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It began, as such things do—although only when they cannot be helped from so doing—with a trip to the countryside for Christmas.
Specifically, to Totleigh Towers, abode of retired magistrate Sir Watkyn Bassett; and as for why this flight into the pastoral should take to a locale so historically dangerous to self and liberty, let me say that the path of wisdom teaches us to pick the lesser of two evils; and, seeing that the only other option on offer to me in that year was at the home of my Aunt Agatha, the balance was clear.
At any rate I can assure you that it was with the dragging step and heavy heart so characteristic of holiday travel that I made my way from town. Jeeves, too, was laden with an unaccustomed melancholy, for he had just been on leave to see his mother, an event which invariably slows him down for a bit after.
Neither of us, in short, was prepared for what was to come.
***
I had heard from my chum Bingo Little that Madeline Bassett, the young lady of the house and a dangerously romantic sort of girl, had become downright spiritual of late, but being more built for ornament than analysis, it had not dawned on me what this might entail.
Scarce had I been there for an hour when she convened a Meeting, drawing our motley holiday party together: herself, her father and his new wife, the former Mrs Wintergreen, her large and terrifying nephew Roderick Spode, my friend and noted newt-fancier Gussie Fink-Nottle, and a small assortment of other guests with whom I devoutly hoped I would have little congress. We milled around a bit as one does before Madeline called us to order and assumed a commanding place at the head of the room.
She launched into preamble as obscure as it was remarkable, unifying, as it did, the principles of Christian theology, the grand design of our Maker, the pagan drive to achieve Truth through Song, World Peace and Fellowship among Men, and some quite radical stuff about eating in moderation and living wholesomely that I could see at a glance was not winning any disciples.
At last she came to the upshot. We would all, she explained, glowing with a visible excitement, be assigned to write a poem for another one of our fellow spirits, to be presented in a highly spiritually advanced (which I suspected meant ‘ill-catered’) fete on the solstice—that is to say, in two days’ time.
I felt quite green. The world lurched as if I’d boarded a ship. Poetry!
Now, I am a devotee of all your music-hall versifications, your comical roundelays, your generally rumpty-tumpty songs of the Volk; but Poetry is a different animal entirely. Poetry, I have always felt, is one of civilization’s most gruesomely elaborated torments.
And there was a gleam in her eye that, though I did not yet know how, surely spelled trouble. One is not thrust into so many disastrous engagements as I have been without picking up a keen sense for impending doom. Cows always know when the earthquake is coming, and so on.
It was an entirely scientific setup she had got going, like an alchemist’s laboratory or the inside of Ladbroke’s. Whole sheaves of paper were scattered about, some of them cut up into little bits, some of them incised with diagrams meticulous and arcane.
It was a randomizing process, she proclaimed, certified by the leading Theosophists of the day, aimed at matching us blindly by our natural sympathies. It was the best possible way to make sure we each were assigned the fellow being we could do the most to support, spiritually speaking.
The little hairs on the back of my neck prickled.
We assembled into a circle, or at any rate a lumpish egg, and took turns removing the envelopes—some of us with more grace and solemnity than others. Madeline reminded us all that our assignments were to be held in the strictest secrecy.
I stared down at my envelope in no little trepidation, but bunged it open with the usual fortitude. When I did, a great sense of peace washed through me, and I nearly laughed aloud:
Lord Sidcup, Sir Roderick Spode.
And I trotted out with a merry heart.
***
You may wonder how this development could possibly have had a salutary effect. Spode is, after all, one of the largest and hardest of blocks, and much given to marching about in public squares in tight pants with a bunch of other chaps interested in a spot of light fascism. Dashing off a ditty to such a cove is, in general, a dangerous pastime.
This was not, however, my first go-round with old Spode, and in the course of snatching victory from the jaws of defeat last time I gained an infallible defense. Its contents? A single word: Eulalie.
For it turns out that Lord Sidcup is, most incongrously, the proprietor of a shop specialising in delicate ladies’ accoutrements—the name of which is Eulalie Soeurs.
Given, therefore, my ace in the whole, I could look forward to this versification in a much more positive light, and I felt the gray matter whizzing and humming with a spritely energy. It took me practically no time at all to dash off a few promising lines.
The matter was happily concluded, I thought, and considered it no more.
***
Gussie cornered me after dinner that night, as near to rending the old garments as I had ever seen him. It appeared to be stomach cramps.
“It is too much,” he pronounced. “I can’t bear it, Bertie.”
He had eaten quite a lot of the roast. It would be enough to challenge any man. “What’s all this, then? Defeated by the cow at last?”
He flapped his hands impatiently. “The poetry, Bertie! Madeline!”
Even though my own fortunes were bright, I could see that surely not everyone could have got so lucky. “Dreadful business, isn’t it?”
“You are one of my oldest chums, you know that, don’t you, Bertie? I made up my mind not to speak to you about it but it’s just too awful!”
He was ceasing to make clear English sense. “Eh?”
He clutched my arm in an ecstasy of guilt. “Madeline—I’m in love with her too. And I must tell her in my poem, I must.”
I regarded him with my expression of most encouraging confusion, hoping that this would begin to come clear. “That’s all very well, but what’s this ‘too’? Who, ‘too’? To who?”
“Well, I know you and she are—you have—” Seeing my blank visage, he faltered. “You are in love with Madeline, aren’t you?”
“My god, by no means! Lay down your fears, my good man, I am behind you cent pour cent. But where did you get that idea?”
His features were a mixture of jubilation and, upon my question, a sudden shiftiness.
“Out with it, Fink-Nottle, what is casting that cloud over you?”
He winced. “I know we weren’t supposed to look in the book before it’s time, but I may have stolen just a tiny peek.”
“Not to worry! My jingle for Spode is well under control.”
“It’s not the poem you’re writing, Bertie, it’s the one you’re getting—from Madeline! And she’s been—staring at you. Quite a lot. And sighing. So I figured you two had to be, you know, in the thick of it.”
This was the blow I had sensed was coming from the very first. More fool I to think I had escaped. Never doubt that animal intuition. “Ah,” I said, and I’m not ashamed to admit that I croaked on it.
“And,” he said defensively, “Jeeves seemed to think so too. He insinuated.”
I had been engaged to Madeline once before, and it was an experience I was determined never to repeat. Frankly, I was shocked that Jeeves could suspect that any change of view could have come over me, but even an intellect as prodigious as his could be mistaken from time to time. Fortunately, regardless of his errors, the circs were such that the answer was clear.
“Gussie, we have got to get her to fall immediately out of love with me and into the soup with you, and the stratagem is obvious. Your poem must be magnificent.”
He beamed at me. Our troubles, having only just come to my attention, were already over. I glowed inside with the light of Fellowship towards Man. All was not lost.
“Oh, jolly good, Bertie, I’m so glad we sorted this out! But,” his face drooped a bit, “how on earth am I supposed to write a magnificent poem?”
“Oh, I don’t know, I should think you’ll have an edge on her affections just from writing her a poem at all. But you’re right, you have to really pull out the stopper on this one.”
“I’ll have to consult Jeeves.”
“You can try,” I said—a bit moodily, I confess. “The fellow is slippery at the best of times, and he’s been practically invisible since we arrived. He disapparates practically before the last sock is laid out.”
“But how am I supposed to consult with him in time?”
“I think you’ll just have to make a go of it yourself, old bean. I don’t know, what do girls like? The stars? Compliments? Maybe you should write about winning her affections away from me. Art mirroring life, and all that. Hopefully it will give her the right idea.”
“And I’ll make you out to be a sort of disreputable creature.”
“There’s a sport! Don’t stop until you hit ‘lewd.’ A chap can’t be too careful.”
***
As I was departing from this clutch to the cool respite of my own chambers, I passed a chambermaid tucked away in a sort of alcove, apparently in distress. Pretty enough gal, if you like that sort of thing, bright-eyed and quick as a whatsit, but dashed did she look clobbered. The eye over-dewy, the mouth a-tremble—quite wreathed about in an air of woe.
The Code of the Woosters is an ancient one, and noble from tip to tail, and even through the murk of historical interpretation the guidelines are clear: a preux chevalier does not leave women to sniffle in crannies.
“Hullo!” I applied, in reassuring tones.
Perhaps she had not been expecting a besieging halloo to be volleyed upon her nook. The poor thing seemed ready to spring for the underbrush.
“I didn’t mean to give you a fright! Let me just try that again.” I reassumed my air of application, at a gentler pitch. “What ho!”
She snuffled again, but with a less wild-eyed look. “Sorry, sir.”
“Not a bit of it,” I said. “It won’t do to have you moistening the draperies. Sir Watkyn prefers them dry.”
This first bridge built, I endeavored to extract the crux from the nub. The facts, as it transpired, were these:
The girl, a maid name of Jane from several villages down the way, was recently arrived to Sir Watkyn's service, and that was a stiff enough cocktail on its own to cast the world in a jaundiced light. But on top of that Madeline had gone quite mad and demanded that the entire staff participate in their own exchange of verse, apparently owing to Egalitarian Principles, and furthermore, she, Jane, didn’t know a lick about poetry, and she had only just got the hang of the whole wheeze around here anyway; and everything, she confided, was beastly.
“Well! It’s alright about the poems anyway. I don’t understand them either.”
“You don’t?” she asked, wide-eyed.
“Oh, no one does. Except Madeline is awfully keen on them for the moment—but everyone else really just purses their lips a bit and raises their eyebrows to look sensitive.” I demonstrated the maneuver. “Do you think you can manage? Give it a go.”
She was game for it; and I had to congratulate her, for she looked exceptionally sensitive. “There’s really only one cove around here who knows anything about poetry,” I said, “and that’s my man Jeeves.”
She regarded me as if I had rescued her kitten from a brook only to dunk it into the punchbowl. “Is he,” she said, mournfully.
“The man,” I told her, “is brilliant. Something of a legend. Eats loads of fish. Frankly a miracle he consents to put up with me, or so my aunt is always saying.”
This only seemed to make it worse. Jeeves, it seemed, was her assigned target—and now I’d gone and put her in a fright that she wouldn’t measure up to his standards.
To have anyone afraid of Jeeves seemed to me an offense against Nature itself. “Jeeves is as gentle as the breath of dawn on the meadow grass! Singing of larks and snails and so forth, you know, bringing cheer! Except in the matter of legwear, but you’ll give that a miss, won’t you?”
“Well,” she said, “I expect.”
“So there you have it! Can’t fail.”
“You have to write a poem yourself, don’t you, sir?”
“And have done! Rattled it off right quick. I was inspired, I daresay.”
“Oh! but—begging your pardon, sir—I thought you didn’t like poetry.”
“Ah, well, as for the capital-P stuff I can’t say I’m very keen, but I do a good jingle when I get in the spirit. More of a music-hall kind of doodley-oo, you know.”
This seemed to be the first thing I’d said right so far. She brightened instantly. “Oh, like a song? Can I do that?”
“I don’t see why not! Are you much of a singer?”
She blushed and demurred, much as I am informed is the wont of maidens fair, but I managed to coax out a few bars of an old standby from her. Within four bars my heart swelled in my breast; in six, a tear had sprung to each eye. Suffice it to say, the pipes were as sweet as a shepherd on a mountain hillside. The girl was a certifiable genius of song.
“I’ll tell you what, Jeeves spends his time on terribly improving things, all sorts of Germans and who knows, but when he gets in a mood and he thinks I’m busy, I hear him humming Danny Boy—and no mistake. If you sing him such a rhapsody he cannot help but be stricken with love for all Mankind.”
“Oh, do you think?” Her big eyes were filled with hope, and I felt positively paternal.
“I am certain of it.”
“That’s wonderful! It’ll be so much easier than trying to do something all fancy. But,” she frowned contemplatively, “what will I sing? I can’t just reuse something somebody else has written.”
“We’ll write you one! Borrow a good old melody, add a doo-be-doo here, a hi-de-ho there, and boomps-a-daisy, there we are. I rattle off a new ditty practically every day in the bath.”
We launched in right there, and hammered out a few stanzas that were rather good, I thought. So many promising rhymes: valet and ballet; socks and groks; fish and wish. But soon enough she had to go, with our work unfinished.
***
I had scarce awoken from my slumber the next morning when Jeeves coughed his most portentous cough. This is a noise which bodes well for no young man in high spirits, who feels that his problems are well under his control, for it invariably insinuates, in the most underhanded manner, that he is entirely wrong about that apprehension, and that serious and irreparable harm is near to him. It is not a happy sound.
I motioned for him to launch the thing, whatever the thing was that must be launched.
“I understand,” he began, “that the maid Jane is a sweet girl, in whom the housekeeper takes a particular, almost maternal interest. Mrs Hopkins would be most upset, should something come to—happen.” For a bloke who was describing a well-run household staffed by caring souls, he was decidedly chilly.
“Well, good, Jeeves! She is splendid, I tell you. Jolly good she has someone looking out for her.”
“Splendid, sir?” Frost glimmered.
“Oh yes. As eggs go she is absolutely all-round good with a capital Guh.”
He took this in with a nod so stiff I could nearly hear the vertebrae crackling. He was mollified in not the slightest.
Strong as the feudal spirit courses through his circulatory system, Jeeves often nevertheless gives the young master the vivid impression that he is near to shaking self by the scruff of the neck. It is a subtle and advanced physiognomic accomplishment, achieved as it is utterly without motion, but I can assure you the effect on the corpus is pronounced, very much as the citizens of Pompeii sensed when first the earth shook.
In general, the question at issue is one of haberdashery, and, as in that realm he is acolyte to a musty tradition which deserves—even requires—a good shaking up, I find it easy enough to summon the spiritual reserves and keep the old form upright. But this time I had not the foggiest idea of what I was in it for, and I was beginning to feel a bit wounded. We seemed to be in perfect agreement on all points; and in fact, I had just spent the evening before musing on his excellences. If anyone had been remiss, it was he, for being so scarce these last few days. Wherefore the old fish-eye?
And I demanded to know as much. “This fish-eye, Jeeves. What is its purpose?”
“Mrs Hopkins confided in me that you have spent a considerable amount of time with the girl, sir.”
“Well—we may have got a bit carried away with the holiday spirit.”
The mountain quaked, and steam began to gust freely from his ears. “This is not some grand joke! I must beg your pardon for speaking out of turn, sir, but I have never known you to be cruel. If something happens, she will be fired. She will be sent home. She will not be able to find further legitimate employment. These are circumstances she and her ailing mother can ill afford.”
The light began to glimmer. It tinked on and in its wan gleam, all the incomprehensibilities of the foregoing were recast, much as the furniture in a dark room after one has stubbed one’s toe.
“You think Jane and I are—carrying on!”
“If there is some other explanation, sir, I should be very glad to hear it.”
“There bally well is!” I shot off, and stopped short. Jeeves wasn’t to know the source of his ode until the party; how could I explain it without giving the game away?
“And what would that happen to be, sir?”
I gawped. The whole truth tickled at the tip of my tongue. In fact I wanted to tell him all about it: how dashed good Jane was at singing, all our clever rhymes, and something else, something with much more of a thingness—to tell you the truth, I simply wanted him to like it.
But a Wooster does not ruin a surprise. Nor does he take credit for another chap’s efforts, even if that chap is a chambermaid thought to be in a rummy sitch! But seeing as the sitch was indeed not rummy, and all would be made clear, e’en to my accuser, at the appointed hour, I called in the cavalry and stiffened the spine.
“You will have to take me at my word, Jeeves. I have no evil designs on sweet Jane,” I said, in the stern tones of a knight of old. “Quite the opposite,” I put in, still a little nettled.
“I begin to see, sir,” he said.
“Now, shall we have a complete change of conversation?”
“Most welcome, sir.” While still leaking steam a bit around the cuffs, he was no longer imminently eruptive.
“I have a question for your tenderest and most discriminating whiskers.”
“I am all attention, sir.”
“Well—what’s the—hm.” I sought a phraseology. “When a bloke is writing a poem for—somebody—and he wants that person to like it, what would you say he should make sure to put in it?” Of course I was fishing for information about what Jane and I should write for him, but I hoped to distract him by way of his former belief that I harbored feelings for Madeline and was busily working on an ode to her virtues.
In general, Jeeves positively basks in these sorts of questions. Deep, abstract, eminently concerned with the psychology of the individual—all sweetest myrrh to his extraordinary brain. He becomes expansive: the finely chiselled bright with thought, the gestures eloquent. On lucky days I can even draw him out so far as to craft diagrams for better explanation.
But the desired effect was not effected. He clammed up faster than a cat in a doghouse.
“There are anthologies of love poetry in the library, sir. Perhaps you should consult one for ideas.”
“I’m not interested in moons and Junes, Jeeves, I’m interested in the psychology of the individual! How does one go about saying to somebody, I think you are absolutely top shelf, you, in particular, and not just because of your shiny hair?”
It was the strangest thing. The volcanic ire which had burbled in him earlier was little in evidence, but he didn’t seem to have attained any happier composure. He was as dry as the Sahara. Indeed, he turned away, dusting a fleck off of an immaculately clean vase.
“I believe you have already grasped the essentials, sir. If you’ll excuse me.” And he biffed away.
***
After that cold bucket of water, I was more concerned than ever that our song should be a success. Jane and I convened a special session.
“The thing is, Jane, I’m afraid Jeeves is pipped with me.”
“I’m sure he isn’t,” she said soothingly, in that way that women do when they are completely wrong but mean to be encouraging.
“Oh, yes, he is. Horribly pipped. There is an ill-concealed animus. The light in his eye is a cold one and flinty. He does not smile on my works and I know not why.” Discontent sloshed in the old bean like dirty wash-water.
“Let’s just finish our last verse,” she said, chivvying me along in the manner of a kindly herd-dog. She really is topping. But so dire were my straits that her best efforts produced only a more violent sloshing.
“It is all wrong!” I cried. “The song! It is not the thing!”
“It’s very funny,” she offered.
“Jeeves isn’t funny!” I fairly shouted. “Jeeves is splendid. Jeeves is the sine qua non, the ne plus ultra. And he only likes things,” I said moodily, flinging myself back on the chaise, “that are good.”
She raised her eyebrows at me. “So we’ll have to write something good.”
I shot up in my seat. “My girl, you’re a genius!” I fell back. “But how?”
“Well, he’s very good at his job, but—who is he, really?”
“He is a man of many secrets,” I said, dragging a pillow over my face. “As silent as the grave, except when it comes to soft-bosomed shirts. I don’t know! If he leaves me I will probably perish.”
“Tut,” she tutted, “he’s not leaving you, sir.”
I groaned in despair; she sat there as cold as stone, continuing to fail to solve my problem.
A snatch of an idea drifted into view. “He’s been downcast all week since his visit home. Always is, afterwards. A gnawing melancholy, if you will.”
“There you go,” she said, “I miss my mum something awful.”
“The man is chockablock with filial piety,” I mused. “He did once let slip that it was a gritty business, leaving to go into service.”
“Blimey,” she said, “don’t I know it!—oh, excuse my language, I don’t know where I’m at.”
I flopped a hand at her to indicate my perfect equanimity.
An idea binged above her head. “What if we wrote him a ballad, like? You know, about the young man who goes out to seek his fortune. And we can put it to a pretty walking tune, it’ll be right nice.”
I let the fullness of this thought wash through me like a cleansing wave, sluicing away the bathwater of despair. “By George,” I said, “I think you’ve got it.”
We had to work at double-speed in order to make do, but between her crystalline tones and my lyrical panache we had a pretty good time of it, and before long we’d hammered out our verses. Whether it would be enough to warm his frozen heart remained to be seen.
***
The party was as meagrely catered as I had feared, but, abuzz as the old frame was with all the plots to be hatched, I could not have eaten so much as a dry half-muffin.
Once we were all assembled, Madeline again took center stage and orated in an impenetrable fashion about higher Principles, and soon enough turned the full force of her attention on to me and declaimed:
Sapling
gold-lashed at evening
laughing in the wind’s refrains—the raucous hall seems to me
sweet with mountain air
when I see you, Geliebte.The stone turned by the plow
is not more startled than I
at birdsong…
I blinked. I frowned. I blinked again.
Madeline has always been as I said a romantic girl, much given to poetry, but the previous forms of her poetic invention ran to the stars as God’s daisy-chain, for example; and the inevitable sadness of twilight; and fairy princesses. This was something else altogether.
As I have said, I am not much of one for poetry, but this seemed to twirl a little and sparkle between the ears. I was conscious of a slight flush about the neck, which after only a moment’s reflection was joined by a mounting terror that somehow, some way, an engagement would soon be thrust upon me.
I worried that she had come down with a fever.
Fortunately, each recipient must in turn be the next presenter, and so I banished the queer feeling from my internals and leapt up to deliver my chef d’oeuvre.
You have heard, presumably, of the cow-boys in America who jump on bulls just for a lark, and roll off laughing as if getting ejected into the stratosphere and nearly trampled was an amiable variety of do-si-do? The same sunny courage animated me now, as I offered to Spode, with my compliments:
Lord Sidcup—a man name of Spode—
arrested his horse by the road,
for his pants had a tear
’cross a firm derriere
so wind-chapped and pink that it glowed!
The man turned a furious scarlet. He was indeed very large. When clenched, his hands—I noticed distantly—were like giant pink hams.
It occurred to me that I might have made a mistake.
But I still had my safeguard to deploy, and I whipped it out with panache. “I was inspired,” I chirped helpfully, “by a girl I met in town. Name of Eulalie.”
The effect was immediate. All motion was arreared, and under the strain, the red complexion empurpled. His small moustache jerked violently as if it wished to fly off and beat me to death itself, but I had him, and he knew it.
The moment was everything I had hoped.
Meanwhile, I became cognizant that Madeline was regarding me in an extremely curious fashion. Never has the doe-soft eye of love been so shadowed by horror.
“I’ve got another,” I said, “maybe you’ll like that one better. ‘There once was a chappie named Roderick’—”
“Enough!” Sir Watkyn bellowed, in tones stentorian; and the party moved onward.
The efforts I had taken to teach Jane the proper attitude when hearing Poetry had put me in tip-top form, and so I was able to glide through the rest of the event with great ease and, dare I say, charisma. Finally, completing the circle, it was Gussie’s turn to read.
While a pal noble and true, the man is a damnable fidgeter, and he fidgeted fiercely upon receipt of the limelight. The terror—which had been so sweetly paused by my triumph over Spode—kicked up in my breast again: that all my efforts would be in vain, and it would not be enough to turn the tide of Madeline’s affections. But after a too, too-long moment, he found his voice, and pronounced:
At lo the spangled dawn of day, the sun
espies from o’er yon hill a treasure fair:
a beauty beyond what immortals have won—
atop a sweet maiden, her long golden hair!His thoughts bend closely to the solemn task:
to lift her radiance from the dullness of night
and yet from some reserve he dares not ask
her sweet self for her hand, not yet, not outright.As winter pulls the year down from bright June
to dwell coldly in the darkest feasting day,
glimpsing her bright curls the insolent moon
creeps close, seeking to hold her in its sway.There the sun watches, though his hours are short,
dreaming of her laugh illuming his court.
If my efforts had swept night and chaos over Madeline’s bright eye, a new day dawned there in this moment. Dawn’s own blush spangled her visage. I was dropped; I was nothing; I was extinguished from her galaxy; all was right with the world.
Not only that, but it suddenly seemed possible that Gussie had even learned something, at Eton, which was almost the most shocking thought so far.
As the ceremony wound to a close, the guests began to disperse, and Madeline swept down on Gussie like a pink-beribboned hawk, hauling him off to some romantic nook for a tête-à-tête. Spode, meanwhile, glared at me from afar, much in the manner of a caged rhinocerous. The day’s work was a smashing success.
There was only one thing left to do: see if Jeeves would forgive me.
***
“How was the servants’ soiree?” I boldly inquired, as soon as I had got him to materialize at the end of the day.
“It was a lovely occasion, sir,” he said, in tones of what was for Jeeves the gravest surprise—that is to say, accompanied by an eyebrow raise of a sixteenth-inch.
“And what did you dash off for it?” I asked, not wanting to give the game away quite yet.
“I composed a georgic for Mrs Hopkins, lauding her efficient and meticulous care of the household; a poor version after the Virgil, of course.”
“Naturally.”
He had managed to busy himself clear on the other end of the room. As I was regarding him for clues, I noticed that an unfamiliar book lay out on the table by my chair, and I picked it up idly.
“The maid Jane has an exquisite soprano,” Jeeves said suddenly.
As Jeeves was still fussing over something with his back turned to me, I permitted a small smile to play over my visage. “Does she? However did you discover that?” I turned the book over in my hands: Das Stunden-Buch, by some cove called Rilke.
“She delivered a sort of folk-song in ballad meter, the effect of which was—striking.” He put down the glass he was cleaning and turned around, looking quite grim. “I am afraid I must apologize to you for my earlier behavior, sir. She is a remarkable young woman, and I believe she will do you credit.”
This speech had been as music to my ears until it took a sharp left and tumbled down in a tangle. “She’s a corker, no quarrel here, but what on earth are you talking about?”
“I thought,” Jeeves began, with notable hesitation, “—I came to the conclusion that you must be intending to wed the young woman.”
I was agog. “I am agog,” I told him.
“You do not have such an intention?”
“Of course not!”
“You assured me that your intentions were—” he stopped short.
“Pure as the driven, yes! She’s a lovely girl and I wish her the best. That’s quite as far as it goes.”
“But you have been spending a great deal of time with her,” he said. For a genius he seemed to be having a good deal of trouble piecing the thing together.
I gave him a little look. It is not often I am one step ahead of him and I intended to extend the experience until such time as he could connect the wires. “Tell me, Jeeves, what is this book doing here?”
The poker-face snapped back on. “My apologies, sir. Miss Bassett borrowed it from me and I have yet to place it back with my things.”
I frowned down into the thing. “I didn’t know Madeline read German.”
“Ah,” Jeeves said, though it was also sort of like a “hm,” or one of those pure neutral vowel sounds without shape or inflection.
“Her poem was the strangest thing, I’ll tell you that, Jeeves. Almost as if she hadn’t written it at all.”
“Indeed, sir?”
“Or maybe it’s not strange at all,” I said, a foggy understanding beginning to coalesce in my mind. “You know, Jeeves, I think I might be starting to come around to poetry.”
“It allows for the expression of feelings that are difficult to verbalize in everyday language,” he said.
“That’s just how I would explain it,” I agreed. “Merry Christmas, Jeeves.”
“Merry Christmas, sir.”