"Our compet.i.tion, you see."
"About Miss Burn, don"t you know."
"Which is to propose first?"
"We can"t settle it."
The Rev. Henry smiled a faint, saintly smile and raised a protesting hand.
"My advice," he said, "is that both of you should refrain from proposing."
"What?" said d.i.c.k.
"_Wha-at_?" said Tom.
"You see," purred the Rev. Henry, "you are both very young fellows.
Probably you do not know your own minds. You take these things too seri----"
"Now, look here," said Tom.
"None of that rot," said d.i.c.k.
"I shall propose tonight."
"I shall propose this evening."
"I shouldn"t," said the Rev. Henry. "The fact is----"
"Well?"
"Well?"
"I didn"t tell you before, for fear it should put you off your game; but Miss Burn is engaged already, and has been for three days."
The two rivals started.
"Engaged!" cried Tom.
"Whom to?" hissed d.i.c.k.
"Me," murmured Harry.
JEEVES TAKES CHARGE
Now, touching this business of old Jeeves--my man, you know--how do we stand? Lots of people think I"m much too dependent on him. My Aunt Agatha, in fact, has even gone so far as to call him my keeper. Well, what I say is: Why not? The man"s a genius. From the collar upward he stands alone. I gave up trying to run my own affairs within a week of his coming to me. That was about half a dozen years ago, directly after the rather rummy business of Florence Craye, my Uncle Willoughby"s book, and Edwin, the Boy Scout.
The thing really began when I got back to Easeby, my uncle"s place in Shropshire. I was spending a week or so there, as I generally did in the summer; and I had had to break my visit to come back to London to get a new valet. I had found Meadowes, the fellow I had taken to Easeby with me, sneaking my silk socks, a thing no bloke of spirit could stick at any price. It transpiring, moreover, that he had looted a lot of other things here and there about the place, I was reluctantly compelled to hand the misguided blighter the mitten and go to London to ask the registry office to dig up another specimen for my approval. They sent me Jeeves.
I shall always remember the morning he came. It so happened that the night before I had been present at a rather cheery little supper, and I was feeling pretty rocky. On top of this I was trying to read a book Florence Craye had given me. She had been one of the house-party at Easeby, and two or three days before I left we had got engaged. I was due back at the end of the week, and I knew she would expect me to have finished the book by then. You see, she was particularly keen on boosting me up a bit nearer her own plane of intellect. She was a girl with a wonderful profile, but steeped to the gills in serious purpose.
I can"t give you a better idea of the way things stood than by telling you that the book she"d given me to read was called "Types of Ethical Theory," and that when I opened it at random I struck a page beginning:--
_The postulate or common understanding involved in speech is certainly co-extensive, in the obligation it carries, with the social organism of which language is the instrument, and the ends of which it is an effort to subserve._
All perfectly true, no doubt; but not the sort of thing to spring on a lad with a morning head.
I was doing my best to skim through this bright little volume when the bell rang. I crawled off the sofa and opened the door. A kind of darkish sort of respectful Johnnie stood without.
"I was sent by the agency, sir," he said. "I was given to understand that you required a valet."
I"d have preferred an undertaker; but I told him to stagger in, and he floated noiselessly through the doorway like a healing zephyr. That impressed me from the start. Meadowes had had flat feet and used to clump. This fellow didn"t seem to have any feet at all. He just streamed in. He had a grave, sympathetic face, as if he, too, knew what it was to sup with the lads.
"Excuse me, sir," he said gently.
Then he seemed to flicker, and wasn"t there any longer. I heard him moving about in the kitchen, and presently he came back with a gla.s.s on a tray.
"If you would drink this, sir," he said, with a kind of bedside manner, rather like the royal doctor shooting the bracer into the sick prince. "It is a little preparation of my own invention. It is the Worcester Sauce that gives it its colour. The raw egg makes it nutritious. The red pepper gives it its bite. Gentlemen have told me they have found it extremely invigorating after a late evening."
I would have clutched at anything that looked like a life-line that morning. I swallowed the stuff. For a moment I felt as if somebody had touched off a bomb inside the old bean and was strolling down my throat with a lighted torch, and then everything seemed suddenly to get all right. The sun shone in through the window; birds twittered in the tree-tops; and, generally speaking, hope dawned once more.
"You"re engaged!" I said, as soon as I could say anything.
I perceived clearly that this cove was one of the world"s wonders, the sort no home should be without.
"Thank you, sir. My name is Jeeves."
"You can start in at once?"
"Immediately, sir."
"Because I"m due down at Easeby, in Shropshire, the day after tomorrow."
"Very good, sir." He looked past me at the mantelpiece. "That is an excellent likeness of Lady Florence Craye, sir. It is two years since I saw her ladyship. I was at one time in Lord Worplesdon"s employment.
I tendered my resignation because I could not see eye to eye with his lordship in his desire to dine in dress trousers, a flannel shirt, and a shooting coat."
He couldn"t tell me anything I didn"t know about the old boy"s eccentricity. This Lord Worplesdon was Florence"s father. He was the old buster who, a few years later, came down to breakfast one morning, lifted the first cover he saw, said "Eggs! Eggs! Eggs! d.a.m.n all eggs!"
in an overwrought sort of voice, and instantly legged it for France, never to return to the bosom of his family. This, mind you, being a bit of luck for the bosom of the family, for old Worplesdon had the worst temper in the county.
I had known the family ever since I was a kid, and from boyhood up this old boy had put the fear of death into me. Time, the great healer, could never remove from my memory the occasion when he found me--then a stripling of fifteen--smoking one of his special cigars in the stables. He got after me with a hunting-crop just at the moment when I was beginning to realise that what I wanted most on earth was solitude and repose, and chased me more than a mile across difficult country. If there was a flaw, so to speak, in the pure joy of being engaged to Florence, it was the fact that she rather took after her father, and one was never certain when she might erupt. She had a wonderful profile, though.
"Lady Florence and I are engaged, Jeeves," I said.
"Indeed, sir?"
You know, there was a kind of rummy something about his manner.
Perfectly all right and all that, but not what you"d call chirpy. It somehow gave me the impression that he wasn"t keen on Florence. Well, of course, it wasn"t my business. I supposed that while he had been valeting old Worplesdon she must have trodden on his toes in some way.