The exquisite code of politeness of the Woosters prevented me clipping her one on the ear-hole, but I would have given a shilling to be able to do it.
I curbed my resentment. We Woosters are fair-minded. We can make allowances for men who have been parading London all night in scarlet tights.
‘No. It is too late. Remarks have been passed about my tummy which it is impossible to overlook.’
I must say for Jeeves that—till, as he is so apt to do, he starts shoving his oar in and cavilling and obstructing—he makes a very good audience. I don’t know if he is actually agog, but he looks agog, and that’s the great thing.
‘Right Ho, Jeeves’ is the second of the 11 full-length Jeeves and Wooster novels by P.G. Wodehouse. After the first novel took the characters off to the Somerset estate of Chuffy Chuffnell, this is a return to the more familiar setting of London, but the basic motor of the plot remains the same: one of Bertie Wooster’s old school friends falls in love, triggering a world of problems and complications which can only be solved by the miraculous powers of Jeeves. In this case the young chap in trouble is the unworldly nature fan, Gussie Fink-Nottle who has fallen in love with Madeline
All the usual mannerisms are here: farcical plots based on the complicated misunderstandings of posh young people falling in love and managing their eccentric parents, all refracted through the ludicrously upper class attitude of the wonderfully dim and self-deluding narrator, the upper-class idler Bertram ‘Bertie’ Wooster. And all the usual stylistic elements:
Comically dim references to classical literature
‘Well, let me tell you that the man that hath no music in himself…’ I stepped to the door. ‘Jeeves,’ I called down the passage, ‘what was it Shakespeare said the man who hadn’t music in himself was fit for?’
‘Treasons, stratagems, and spoils, sir.’
‘Thank you, Jeeves.’
It’s a running gag that Bertie regularly wants to quote some gem of English literature but can never remember the details:
I remember when I was a kid at school having to learn a poem of sorts about a fellow named Pig-something—a sculptor he would have been, no doubt—who made a statue of a girl, and what should happen one morning but that the bally thing suddenly came to life.
Bertie forgets his words
Forgetting famous quotations is just one aspect of the broader comic topos of Bertie constantly forgetting the words for things:
There you will be, up on that platform, a romantic, impressive figure, the star of the whole proceedings, the what-d’you-call-it of all eyes.
‘Come, come, Tuppy, don’t let us let this little chat become acrid. Is ‘acrid’ the word I want?’
There’s a word beginning with r——“re” something——“recal” something—No, it’s gone. But what I am driving at is that is what this Angela was showing herself.
And needing to be corrected, generally by Jeeves:
She proceeded to develop her theme, speaking in ringing, enthusiastic tones, as if she loved the topic. Jeeves could tell you the word I want. I think it’s “ecstatic”, unless that’s the sort of rash you get on your face and have to use ointment for.
And:
‘To be quite candid, Jeeves, I have frequently noticed before now a tendency or disposition on your part to become—what’s the word?’
‘I could not say, sir.’
‘Eloquent? No, it’s not eloquent. Elusive? No, it’s not elusive. It’s on the tip of my tongue. Begins with an ‘e’ and means being a jolly sight too clever.’
‘Elaborate, sir?’
‘That is the exact word I was after. Too elaborate, Jeeves.’
And:
‘What do you call it when two people of opposite sexes are bunged together in close association in a secluded spot, meeting each other every day and seeing a lot of each other?’
‘Is ‘propinquity’ the word you wish, sir?’
‘It is. I stake everything on propinquity, Jeeves. Propinquity, in my opinion, is what will do the trick.’
Jeeves’s command of vocabulary is a small but significant aspect of his overall command of all situations. Jeeves’s interventions to correct Bertie’s speech, to suggest the correct word or phrase, to supply the quotations Bertie has forgotten, these are all verbal indications or equivalents of his role in the stories, which is to be the still point around which all the stormy plot complications rage.
And it’s not just on Bertie; the narrative notes Jeeves’s effect on everyone’s vocabulary:
‘Well, it’s a matter of psychology, he said.’
There was a time when a remark like that would have had me snookered. But long association with Jeeves has developed the Wooster vocabulary considerably.
The ‘the’
A really prominent part of Bertie’s diction (defined as: ‘the choice and use of words and phrases in speech or writing’) is his insistent use of ‘the’ where everyone else would use a personal pronoun such as ‘my’, ‘his’ and so on.
Until she spoke them, I had been all sweetness and light—the sympathetic nephew prepared to strain every nerve to do his bit. I now froze, and the face became hard and set.
Tuppy, old man. Your tone shocks me. One raises the eyebrows.
He did a sort of twiddly on the turf with his foot. And, when he spoke, one spotted the tremolo in the voice.
I stroked the chin thoughtfully.
The face was pale, the eyes gooseberry-like, the ears drooping, and the whole aspect that of a man who has passed through the furnace and been caught in the machinery
Bertram in the third person
There are the many times Bertie refers to himself in the third person, mockingly but also seriously, as ‘Bertram’, both in the narrative and in dialogue with others.
‘You have Bertram Wooster in your corner, Gussie.’
Bertram Wooster is not accustomed to this gluttonous appetite for his society.
Nobody is more eager to oblige deserving aunts than Bertram Wooster, but there are limits, and sharply defined limits, at that.
Well, as anybody at the Drones will tell you, Bertram Wooster is a pretty hard chap to outgeneral.
The Woosters
In the same spirit, Bertie strews his narrative with many comically mock heroic references to his family.
I mean to say, while firmly resolved to tick him off, I didn’t want to gash his feelings too deeply. Even when displaying the iron hand, we Woosters like to keep the thing fairly matey.
Half a dozen sentences start with the formula ‘we Woosters’ before going on to boast of their accomplishments.
A Wooster’s word is his bond. Woosters may quail, but they do not edge out.
I had won the victory, and we Woosters do not triumph over a beaten foe.
We Woosters are men of tact and have a nice sense of the obligations of a host
When we Woosters put our hands to the plough, we do not readily sheathe the sword.
Slang
Slang is language at play. It is so enjoyable because it represents energy and life and is often very funny, as, for example, in rhyming slang. Wodehouse’s stories are characterised from start to finish by their extreme deployment, their barrage, of upper-class slang, which is endlessly inventive and amusing.
The mystery had conked. I saw all.
Not to put too fine a point upon it, I consider that of all the dashed silly, drivelling ideas I ever heard in my puff this is the most blithering and futile.
‘I like your crust, wiring that you would come next year or whenever it was. You’re coming now.’
The way I look at it is that, as the thing is bound to be a frost, anyway, one may as well get a hearty laugh out of it.
But I claim the right to have a pop at these problems, as they arise, in person, without having everybody behave as if Jeeves was the only onion in the hash.
I was heart and soul in favour of healing the breach and rendering everything hotsy-totsy once more between these two young sundered blighters.
The pathos of the thing gave me the pip.
He was smelling a rose at the moment in a limp sort of way, but removed the beak as I approached.
We had hit the great open spaces at a moment when twilight had not yet begun to cheese it in favour of the shades of night.
This time she shook the pumpkin.
Abbreviations
An increasingly prominent category of slang is abbreviations, abbreviating a word down to just one syllable or, increasingly often, just to one letter, ‘conspic. by its a.’ being an instance which combines both types. The abbreviated syllables cropped up in some of the short stories but I think these one-letter abbreviations only make their first appearance in the first novel i.e. are a newish innovation.
One syllable
Anybody been phoning or calling or anything during my abs.?
In the circs., no doubt, a certain moodiness was only natural.
‘No, Jeeves. No more. Enough has been said. Let us drop the subj.’
The persp., already bedewing my brow, became a regular Niagara.
‘Could?’ I said, for my attensh had been wandering.
‘I don’t suppose she said two words to anybody else, except, of course, idle conv. at the crowded dinner table.’
His manifest pippedness excited my compash, and I ventured a kindly word.
One letter
‘I wouldn’t have thought that this Fink-Nottle would ever have fallen a victim to the divine p, but, if he has, no wonder he finds the going sticky.’
However, on consideration, I saw that there was nothing to be gained by trying to lead up to it gently. It is never any use beating about the b.
I took another oz. of the life-saving and inclined my head.
I could see at a g. that the unfortunate affair had got in amongst her in no uncertain manner. Her usually cheerful map was clouded, and the genial smile conspic. by its a.
There was no play of expression on his finely chiselled to indicate it. There very seldom is on Jeeves’s f-c.
Presently I was sauntering towards the drawing-room with the good old j. nestling snugly abaft the shoulder blades.
In the stress of recent happenings I had rather let that prize-giving business slide to the back of my mind; but I had speedily recovered and, as I say, was able to reply with a manly d.f.
‘This habit of the younger g. of scattering ‘darlings’ about like birdseed is one that I deprecate.’
‘I assumed that you were apologizing for your foul conduct in looping back the last ring that night in the Drones, causing me to plunge into the swimming b. in the full soup and fish.’
Old Pop Kipling never said a truer word than when he made that crack about the f. of the s. being more d. than the m.
Binge
A note on the word ‘binge’ which in Bertie’s hands, sometimes means simply party or ‘do’ (synonymous with ‘beano’); but at other times means something more like that other fashionable ’20s and ’30s word, ‘stunt’.
a) Party
This birthday binge of his was to be on a scale calculated to stagger humanity…
These country binges are all the same. A piano, one fiddle, and a floor like sandpaper.
b) More general event
‘Gussie,’ I said, ‘take an old friend’s advice, and don’t go within a mile of this binge.’
I had told Jeeves that this binge would be fraught with interest, and it was fraught with interest.
Those interruptions had been enough to prove to the perspicacious that here, seated on the platform at the big binge of the season, was one who, if pushed forward to make a speech, might let himself go in a rather epoch-making manner.
The Drones club
Bertie is a member of the Drones Club, a collection of like-minded posh wastrels. It’s been mentioned before, but felt a bit more prominent in this book.
I sent this [telegram] off on my way to the Drones, where I spent a restful afternoon throwing cards into a top-hat with some of the better element.
I remember Cats-meat Potter-Pirbright bringing a police rattle into the Drones one night and loosing it off behind my chair…
I sang as I dressed for dinner that night. At the Drones I was so gay and cheery that there were several complaints.
Long association with the members of the Drones has put me pretty well in touch with the various ways in which an overdose of the blushful Hippocrene can take the individual…
Bertie’s memoirs
It’s a small thing, but I’m struck by the detail that Bertie refers to the texts we’re reading as his memoirs.
If you have followed these memoirs of mine with the proper care, you will be aware that I have frequently had occasion to emphasise the fact that Aunt Dahlia is all right.
This self-consciousness about the status and genre of the text – mentioning their format and motivation – harks back to Victorian story-tellers and is just one way in which it echoes Conan Doyle.
Echoes of Sherlock: cases, clients and methods
Surprisingly, Sherlock Holmes casts a long shadow over Wodehouse. For example Bertie, author of ‘these memoirs’ (much as Dr Watson is the author of the Holmes accounts), routinely refers to the challenges and problems which make up the plot as ‘cases‘ (exactly as Watson refers to Holmes’s cases). (To be fair, plenty of other detectives used the same word, but it’s Holmes they most remind us of.)
My report of the complex case of Gussie Fink-Nottle, Madeline Bassett, my Cousin Angela, my Aunt Dahlia, my Uncle Thomas, young Tuppy Glossop and the cook, Anatole.
I nodded. ‘I remember. Yes, I recall the Sipperley case.’
He deliberately echoes Watson’s way of referring to Holmes’s cases when he talks about ‘the Sipperley Case, the Episode of My Aunt Agatha and the Dog McIntosh, and the smoothly handled Affair of Uncle George and The Barmaid’s Niece’.
They are so much conceived of as ‘cases’ that they need to be handled.
‘In handling the case of Augustus Fink-Nottle, we must keep always in mind the fact that we are dealing with a poop.’
Only a couple of days ago I was compelled to take him off a case because his handling of it was so footling.
And it’s not just the concept of ‘cases’ which echo the Holmes stories but his deliberate description of the people who come to him9 with their problems as ‘clients’.
In the excitement of getting Gussie fixed up I had rather forgotten about this other client. It is often that way when you’re trying to run two cases at once.
He jokingly refers to the way so many of his friends consult Jeeves about their problems that he in effect runs ‘a consulting practice’.
That’s how these big consulting practices like Jeeves’s grow. When he’s got A out of a bad spot, A puts B on to him. And then, when he has fixed up B, B sends C along. And so on, if you get my drift, and so forth.
At one point Wodehouse has Bertie deliberately citing a very famous quote which occurs in several the Holmes stories:
‘You know my methods, Jeeves. Apply them.’
And at not one but several points, the comparison is made absolutely explicit:
One can’t give the raspberry to a client. I mean, you didn’t find Sherlock Holmes refusing to see clients just because he had been out late the night before at Doctor Watson’s birthday party.
Or when Jeeves explains to Bertie that:
‘Possibly you may recollect that it was an axiom of the late Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s fictional detective, Sherlock Holmes, that the instinct of everyone, upon an alarm of fire, is to save the object dearest to them.’
The plot
Bertie returns to London from a holiday in Cannes spent in the company of his Aunt Dahlia Travers, her daughter Angela and her soppy friend, Madeline Bassett.
The white mess jacket
Before I get too far I need to mention that Bertie brought back from Cannes a white mess jacket (with brass buttons) and that when Jeeves sees it he takes strong objection to it. As you know, this squabble about clothes happens in many of the short stories and always follows the same pattern: the subject is established near the start, Bertie insists he’s going to put his foot down and stand no nonsense from Jeeves, then Jeeves repeatedly saves the day getting Bertie and chums out of dire situations, so that at the conclusion Bertie is so overcome with gratitude that he caves in to Jeeves and gets rid of the offending article of clothing.
Jeeves advises Gussie Fink-Nottle
Anyway, on his return he discovers that in his absence, his valet, Jeeves, has been advising Bertie’s old school friend, Gussie Fink-Nottle about a love affair. Gussie is an anti-social teetotaller who lives out in the countryside where he devotes himself to caring for newts. What has brought him to London is that he is smitten with the wet fish Madeline but is too timid to propose.
Fancy dress
When Bertie gets back to his flat after an evening at the Drones club, he discovers Gussie in conversation with Jeeves and dressed as (the devil) Mephistopheles. This is because Madeline has invited him to attend a fancy-dress ball and Jeeves has advised he doesn’t go as the standard poshboy outfit of Pierrot but something more virile and dashing (he had originally suggested a pirate outfit but Gussie ‘objected to the boots’).
In the event the fancy dress scheme is a washout because Gussie is so useless. He is staying in London with his uncle and takes a cab to the party, dressed as the devil, but en route realises he’s left his money back at his uncle’s. He thinks he’ll tap someone at the party to pay the taxi but when they arrive he finds he’s got the wrong address and the butler at the big house they’ve arrived at disclaims all knowledge of any party. He can’t even go back to his uncle’s because all the servants have been given the night off and he’s forgotten his key. So the best he can do is try to run off without paying the cab. But when the driver grabs his coat and pulls it off, Gussy is revealed in all his glory as the devil, freaking the driver out and terrifying passersby. So not, on the whole, the most successful of evenings.
Aunt Dahlia requests
The next theme is introduced when Bertie receives a telegram from his Aunt Dahlia demanding that he go down to her country seat immediately. When Bertie is too dim to do this, she storms up to London, into his flat and trumpets her plan at him: she is a governor of the local grammar school, Market Snodsbury Grammar School, which is due to have its summer prize-giving ceremony the next month and she wants Bertie to give the prizes. Incidentally, Aunt Dahlia calls Bertie:
- you old ass
- you maddening half-wit
- a fathead
- greedy young pig
- poor fish
- abysmal chump
- eyesore
- ‘What a pest you are, you miserable object,’ she sighed
Gussie leaves for Brinkley Court
Next morning young Gussie comes round to Bertie’s flat, and Bertie solemnly ticks him off for listening to Jeeves and not to him, Bertie. (This is hubris. We know that all Bertie’s plans end in disaster and that time after time he is only saved by Jeeves’s ingenuity.) Then Gussie informs him that his beloved Madeline is leaving London anyway. She’s going to the country, to stay with a family named Travers at a place called Brinkley Court! This is, of course, the home of Aunt Dahlia!!
So Bertie has, what for him, is a brainwave, sees he can kill two birds with one stone. First he tells Gussie he’ll get him an invite to Brinkley Hall so he can go see his lady love. But then he telegrams to Aunt Dahlia saying he is indisposed/too busy to perform the prize-giving she bullied him into, but has found a replacement, by which he of course means Gussie.
Bertie is summoned to Brinkley Court
All appears settled but the next thing that happens is that Bertie receives an anguished telegram from Aunt Dahlia telling him that the long-planned engagement between her daughter Angela and Tuppy Glossop has been cancelled. The couple has fallen out. Apparently he said that her new hat made her look like a Pekinese dog. But what clinched it is that during her holiday in Cannes, Angela was attacked by a shark (this is played for laughs although ever since the 1977 movie of the same name, no-one thinks a shark attack is funny) but when she retold the story, Tuppy mockingly said it was probably just a log, or a flatfish at most. Which led Angela to reply that he ought to lay off the carbs as he was getting pretty lardy. And so the argument unravelled.
The reader is a bit surprised that this appears to be a big enough crisis that Bertie feels obliged to hot foot it down to Brinkley Court to comfort his aunt. Here she lays out her troubles:
- Tuppy and Angela have broken off their engagement
- she has to find someone to conduct the school prize-giving
- her husband just received a whopping income tax bill (which he is convinced symbolises the end of British civilisation as we known it)
- at the same moment that she needs to find £500 to keep her magazine, Milady’s Boudoir, afloat
- but that in fact he gave her the necessary money but she lost it playing baccarat at Cannes, and can’t pluck up the courage to tell him
It’s important to emphasise that Aunt Dahlia thinks Bertie is a complete clot, thinks that every plan he suggests, in fact almost everything he says, is unmitigated idiocy. And that she prefers Jeeves. In fact it’s a recurring comic trope that everyone Bertie talks to sooner or later thanks him for coming but asks where Jeeves is. This begins to really rile Bertie.
The dinner refusal
Later, talking to Tuppy, Bertie comes up with a cunning plan. He will advise Tuppy to refuse dinner that evening, the point being is it will be a dinner cooked by Anatole, the legendary chef. And this unprecedented gesture well convince Angela he has gone off his food for love of her. And they’ll be reconciled.
When Aunt Dahlia comes to him, saying she’s had no opportunity of talking to her husband about the lost money, Bertie advises her to push away Anatole’s dinner, in order to persuade Uncle Tom how upset she is.
And when Gussie comes to him for help in wooing Madeline, he advises him to reject Anatole’s meal with the same aim in mind.
Unfortunately this cunning plan backfires big time because Anatole, like all culinary geniuses, is very sensitive, and when dish after dish is brought back to the kitchen untouched, the Frenchman decides it is a deliberate snub to his skills and quits! Vowing to return to his native Provence. Which pitches Tom Travers into depths of misery because his stomach was ruined by long years living Out East and Anatole is the only cook who can make dishes acceptable to Tom’s sensitive tum-tum.
Aunt Dahlia suggests suicide
Which is why when he next sees Aunt Dahlia she cheerfully suggests that he goes and drowns himself in the nearby pond. the plan failed for both Tuppy and Gussie as well.
So, as you can see, what we have here is five or six ‘issues’, problems or, as Bertie puts it, ‘cases’, which he sets out to solve with increasingly wayward results until, of course, finally, Jeeves steps in and saves the day.
But first things have to get worse before they can get better. And so:
1. Bertie roasts Tuppy
Bertie has the bright idea of using reverse psychology on Angela, taking her out into the garden and slagging off Tuppy to her, with the idea that she will jump to his defence. Unfortunately, the more Bertie vilifies Tuppy, the more Angela agrees with him, concluding she was wise to dump him before heading indoors. It’s at that moment that, as in a stage farce, Tuppy himself emerges from the bushes nearby where he heard every word, and proceeds to chase Bertie round the garden bench, with a view to smashing his face in.
The thing is Tuppy not only heard Bertie slagging him off but has become convinced that Angela is in love with another man and when Bertie innocently remarks that he (Bertie) and Angela were inseparable in their two-month holiday at Cannes, Tuppy puts 2 and 2 together and concludes that Angela dumped him because she is really in love with Bertie. Obviously Bertie goes to great lengths to emphasis that this isn’t true, but Tuppy still insists on thinking there must be some other man…
2. The drunken prize-giving
In an obvious set-piece, Gussie undertakes the prize-giving at the local grammar school (which Bertie had adroitly ducked) completely drunk. How come? Bertie has the disastrous idea that Gussie is failing to propose to Madeline because he is so cripplingly shy and the way to circumvent this is to pop some booze in his daily orange juice. Bertie starts from the comic premise that no man in his right mind would give up his bachelor freedom for the married state, or could bring himself to spout loads of romantic nonsense – and therefore a chap needs to be well-oiled to even try. The first problem is that, before he gets to the spiked orange juice, Gussie takes Bertie’s advice to heart and swigs half a bottle of Scotch. Realising this Bertie then tries to hide the spiked OJ but when his back is turned, Gussie swigs this as well.
Thus he is completely trolleyed when he is motored to the school by Aunt Dahlia and Uncle Tom (Jeeves and Bertie following in the latter’s car). There follows exactly the kind of comic set-piece you might expect, with Gussie shown to the place of honour on the stage in front of a hundred silent schoolboys and all their parents and proceeding, of course, to make an ass of himself.
3. The girls get engaged to the wrong men
When Gussie starts to single Bertie out for criticism from the stage, our hero legs it, gets back to Brinkley and goes for a lie-down. When he rises for dinner, he is astonished to learn that a) Angela has got engaged to drunken Gussie (!!!) and b) Madeline has gotten it into her head that she (Madeline) is engaged to Bertie. This is because the day before Bertie took her into the garden and described how there was someone staying at the house whose heart beat deeply for her – and listening to her vapourings about fairies and stars. Obviously he intended to be selling her on Gussie but Madeline got the wrong end of the stick and thinks i) he is in love with her and ii) his witless ramblings amounted to a proposal!
Aunt Dahlia is delighted
One silver lining in all this is that Aunt Dahlia, instead of being outraged at Gussie’s drunken shambles of a presentation speech, thought it was immensely entertaining, not least because he singled out her husband, Tom, for some drunken criticism, and then accused Bertie of cheating at school (in order to win the much-coveted Scripture Prize, which Bertie is very proud of and keeps reminding us of, mainly because it was the peak of his academic career). As she puts it:
‘What was there to be peeved about? I took the whole thing as a great compliment, proud to feel that any drink from my cellars could have produced such a majestic jag. It restores one’s faith in post-war whisky.’
Also, after a day of beseeching and wheedling, Dahlia has managed to persuade Anatole to withdraw his resignation. Tom (of the gyppy tummy) is delighted and so is the Aunt.
But no sooner has she finished explaining this than her butler, Seppings, enters the room to ask whether my lady gave permission for Gussie to be on the roof, making rude faces through the skylight of Anatole’s bedroom. There’s a little comic pastiche as Wodehouse describes Bertie, Aunt Dahlia and Seppings in the manner of racehorses charging up the stairs to see who can get to Anatole’s attic room first. (Aunt Dahlia won by a short head. Half a staircase separated second and third.)
At long last, Bertie asks Jeeves
Maybe I’d had a particularly trying day at work, but eventually all this farcical complexity began to wear a little. Wooster by himself eventually gets a bit much; it’s the dynamic between him and Jeeves which is so priceless. For most of this novel Bertie is not just narrating but the active protagonist of all the plot developments and this eventually starts to feel a bit monotonous.
Finally, about 83% into the text (according to my Kindle edition) Bertie swallows his pride and asks Jeeves if he can think of a way out of the terrible mess everything’s got into.
The fire alarm stunt
Jeeves proposes the old fire alarm stunt i.e. ring the house’s (very large) alarm bell as if there’s a fire, on the principle that the two erring couples will run to save each other and True Love be revealed.
The bell ringing goes easily enough but when all the inhabitants have evacuated the building and are standing around on the lawn, none of the estranged couples have gotten together. Seems like a failure.
Aunt Dahlia is amused at Bertie’s idiocy and doesn’t even mind too much when it is revealed that the front door has blown shut and all the other windows and doors are locked. Nobody has a spare key. Why not call the staff or ask the butler? Because the entire staff have gone off to Kingham Manor, the stately-home belonging to the Stretchley-Budd family, who are hosting a big dance party for servants. So it looks like all the posh inhabitants are going to have to spend the night on the lawn and everyone, accordingly, blames Bertie.
They have the bright idea to motor over to Kingham Manor to get the keys off the butler until they discover that the garage, also, is locked up and the chauffeur off at the party.
It’s at this point the Jeeves makes the suggestion that Bertie should cycle over to Kingham Manor and get the front door key. Bertie puts up every sort of objection, but Aunt Dahlia imperiously commands him to go. It’s a nightmare journey 9 miles along country lanes in the dark but there is a surprise in store. For when Bertie finally arrives at Kingham Manor, makes his way to the dance, identifies the butler and interrupts his dance, the man tells him he doesn’t have the key. More astonishing still, he tells Bertie that he gave the key to Jeeves!
Astonished and then furiously angry, Bertie sets off, with a saddle-sore bum and aching legs, the 9 mile return journey. but when he pulls up outside Brinkley Manor he discovers everyone has gone inside. And the person who answers the front door is wet Madeline who, to his vast relief, gaspingly asks Bertie to release her from their vow (their engagement that never was). This is because she realises that all along she has been bearing the flame of true love for Gussie, and wants to marry him. Bertie is amazed and relieved.
Next person he meets is Tuppy, breezily coming up from the wine cellar with bottles under his arm, who tells him they’re having a little party in the drawing room. As to the disagreement with Angela, all has been forgiven and forgotten and they are re-engaged.
As to Aunt Dahlia she is delighted because Anatole has finally decided to stay, which delights Uncle Tom so much that he has happily given her the £500 she needs to save her magazine.
In fact all the issues which have been plaguing the book have been completely sorted while Bertie was away. Of course he soon bumps into Jeeves and is too amazed at this reversal of fortune to be cross with him. And Jeeves explains: he explains that his family used to have a relative they all loved to hate; whenever she was around, she united the family in their dislike of her. Well, that’s what Jeeves did to Bertie. He let him go ahead with the fire alarm stunt precisely because it was such a bad idea that it would bring everyone together in complaining about him. Even more so when they could all complain about it being his fault they were all locked out of the house.
So while Bertie was cycling off, this rallying round a common hate figure made everyone forget their grievances and, once they’d done that, they naturally gravitated towards the people they really loved.
‘It occurred to me that were you, sir, to be established as the person responsible for the ladies and gentlemen being forced to spend the night in the garden, everybody would take so strong a dislike to you that in this common sympathy they would sooner or later come together.’
Then, when Jeeves ‘found’ the front door key (which he had had on him all the time) and it became obvious that Bertie’s long bicycle odyssey was pointless, they switched from hatred to humour and then feeling sorry for him. So by the time Bertie arrived back the bad feeling that had brought them together had evaporated and he was once again regarded as a harmless buffoon.
Very, very clever. Typically double-edged or multi-layered solution from Jeeves. And in the same way, Bertie’s anger which he nursed all the way back from the dance, dissipates when he sees the magical effects of Jeeves’s trick.
And one last thing: the clothes stunt. Like so many of the short stories, the argument between Jeeves and Bertie over an item of clothing the latter loves and the former loathes, is, as usual, decided in Jeeves’s favour. He regretfully informs Bertie that he accidentally burned the mess jacket while ironing it. To be honest, this is not a particularly clever way of solving the clothes issue; in other stories the destruction of the contentious item of clothing is intimately tied up with the denouement of the plt. Here it is just bolted on as a completely separate event. Still, as Bertie slangily sums the whole thing up:
‘The place is positively stiff with happy endings.’
The cast
- Bertie Wooster – private school, Eton and Oxford, an ass and an idiot with a comically inflated sense of his own abilities
- Jeeves – his valet
- Augustus ‘Gussie’ Fink-Nottle – timid and anti-social, lives in Lincolnshire with his newts – ‘one of those timid, obsequious, teacup-passing, thin-bread-and-butter-offering yes-men whom women of my Aunt Dahlia’s type nearly always like at first sight’ – according to Bertie, ‘wabbling, shrinking, diffident rabbit in human shape’
- Miss Madeline Bassett – only daughter of Sir Watkyn Bassett CBE – ‘a pretty enough girl in a droopy, blonde, saucer-eyed way, but not the sort of breath-taker that takes the breath’
- Aunt Dahlia of Brinkley Court aka Mrs Travers, married to Tom Travers, editor of Milady’s Boudoir, ‘a large, genial soul, with whom it is a pleasure to hob-nob’
- Uncle Tom Travers – Aunt Dahlia’s husband – ‘who always looked a bit like a pterodactyl with a secret sorrow’
- Seppings – Aunt Dahlia’s butler, a cold, unemotional man
- Anatole – Aunt Dahlia’s legendary cook – ‘a tubby little man with a moustache of the outsize or soup-strainer type, and you can generally take a line through it as to the state of his emotions. When all is well, it turns up at the ends like a sergeant-major’s. When the soul is bruised, it droops’
- Waterbury – their chauffeur
- Hildebrand ‘Tuppy’ Glossop – ‘was the fellow who, callously ignoring the fact that we had been friends since boyhood, betted me one night at the Drones that I could swing myself across the swimming bath by the rings—a childish feat for one of my lissomeness—and then, having seen me well on the way, looped back the last ring, thus rendering it necessary for me to drop into the deep end in formal evening costume’ – ‘In build and appearance, Tuppy somewhat resembles a bulldog’
- Pongo Twistleton – fellow member of the Drones Club whose birthday party goes on late into the night with the result that Bertie has a crushing hangover when Aunt Dahlia storms into his bedroom demanding that he officiate at her prize-giving
The Freudian presence
As you know I’ve been collecting references in 1920s and 1930s popular literature to Freud and Freudian ideas.
The nibs who study these matters claim, I believe, that this has got something to do with the subconscious mind, and very possibly they may be right. I wouldn’t have said off-hand that I had a subconscious mind, but I suppose I must without knowing it, and no doubt it was there, sweating away diligently at the old stand, all the while the corporeal Wooster was getting his eight hours. For directly I opened my eyes on the morrow, I saw daylight. Well, I don’t mean that exactly, because naturally I did. What I mean is that I found I had the thing all mapped out. The good old subconscious m. had delivered the goods.
And:
Jeeves, when I discussed the matter with him later, said it was something to do with inhibitions, if I caught the word correctly, and the suppression of, I think he said, the ego. What he meant, I gathered, was that, owing to the fact that Gussie had just completed a five years’ stretch of blameless seclusion among the newts, all the goofiness which ought to have been spread out thin over those five years and had been bottled up during that period came to the surface on this occasion in a lump—or, if you prefer to put it that way, like a tidal wave.
Jeeves’s miraculous mode of transportation
My private belief, as I think I have mentioned before, is that Jeeves doesn’t have to open doors. He’s like one of those birds in India who bung their astral bodies about—the chaps, I mean, who having gone into thin air in Bombay, reassemble the parts and appear two minutes later in Calcutta. Only some such theory will account for the fact that he’s not there one moment and is there the next. He just seems to float from Spot A to Spot B like some form of gas.
Jeeves’s character
One thing I have never failed to hand the man. He is magnetic. There is about him something that seems to soothe and hypnotize. To the best of my knowledge, he has never encountered a charging rhinoceros, but should this contingency occur, I have no doubt that the animal, meeting his eye, would check itself in mid-stride, roll over and lie purring with its legs in the air.
Choice phrases
She unshipped a sigh that sounded like the wind going out of a rubber duck.
You can’t expect an empty aunt to beam like a full aunt.
It isn’t often that Aunt Dahlia, normally as genial a bird as ever encouraged a gaggle of hounds to get their noses down to it, lets her angry passions rise, but when she does, strong men climb trees and pull them up after them.
Hunting, if indulged in regularly over a period of years, is a pastime that seldom fails to lend a fairly deepish tinge to the patient’s complexion, and her best friends could not have denied that even at normal times the relative’s map tended a little toward the crushed strawberry. But never had I seen it take on so pronounced a richness as now. She looked like a tomato struggling for self-expression.
Credit
‘Right Ho, Jeeves’ was published in 1934 by Herbert Jenkins. I read it online.
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