You can’t call a chap the world’s greatest authority on the yellow-billed cuckoo without rousing a certain disposition towards chumminess in him.

Jeeves had projected himself in from the dining-room and materialized on the rug. Lady Malvern tried to freeze him with a look, but you can’t do that sort of thing to Jeeves. He is look-proof.

‘It was a maxim of one of my former employers, sir—as I believe I mentioned to you once before—the present Lord Bridgworth, that there is always a way.’

‘I fear, sir,’ sighed Jeeves, ‘that when it comes to a matter of cooks, ladies have but a rudimentary sense of morality.’

‘I endeavour to give satisfaction, sir,’ said Jeeves.

This is the third collection of Jeeves and Wooster stories by P.G. Wodehouse, ten stories in all, four of them repeated from the first proto-collection, ‘My Man, Jeeves’, rewritten and polished.

They include the ‘origin story’ of how Bertie first met Jeeves. This happened ‘about half a dozen years ago’ i.e. before the Great War. Bertie fired his previous valet, Meadowes, for pinching things and Jeeves came recommended from an agency. At the time Bertie was engaged to the unnecessarily brainy Florence Craye and Jeeves proves his worth by helping him get out of the engagement.

The thing, you see, is that Jeeves is so dashed competent. You can spot it even in the way he shoves studs into a shirt. I rely on him absolutely in every crisis, and he never lets me down. And, what’s more, he can always be counted on to extend himself on behalf of any pal of mine who happens to be to all appearances knee-deep in the bouillon.

It’s mildly surprising that so many of the stories are set in New York, something the narrator addresses directly in the first NY story (second in this set).

The stories

1. Jeeves Takes Charge
2. The Artistic Career of Corky (New York)
3. Jeeves and the Unbidden Guest (New York)
4. Jeeves and the Hard-Boiled Egg (New York)
5. The Aunt and the Sluggard (New York)
6. The Rummy Affair of Old Biffy (Paris)
7. Without the Option
8. Fixing it for Freddie
9. Clustering Round Young Bingo
10. Bertie Changes His Mind

1. Jeeves Takes Charge (1916)

London: Bertie hires Jeeves for the first time. Jeeves immediately demonstrates his worth by serving up a drink which cures hangovers. Bertie is engaged to Lady Florence Craye who asks him to return to Easeby, his Uncle Willoughby’s country house, to help her. Bertie had advised her to get into his uncle’s good books by offering to read the old boy’s memoirs, ‘Recollections of a Long Life’. She is appalled because they reveal a life of dissipation and also feature Florence’s own father, Lord Worplesdon, in a bad light, so Florence says that if he really loves her, Bertie will get rid of the manuscript.

So after it’s been left in the hall for a servant to take to the post Bertie nicks it and locks it in a chest of drawers in his room. But when the manuscript fails to turn up at his publishers, Uncle Willoughby smells a rat, and Bertie is betrayed by Florence’s kid brother, an over-officious youth named Edwin.

But when Uncle Willoughby insists on searching Bertie’s room, and opens the fatal drawer, the manuscript is not there. Of course Jeeves has whisked it away. In fact he has sent it to the publishers, arguing that it actually contains very mild and harmless stuff. When she hears that Bertie has failed her, Lady Florence promptly dumps him but Jeeves assures Bertie she was not a good match for him anyway.

Thus is established Jeeves’s almost supernatural ability to solve all problems, anticipate all complications, and do the best thing for his master.

2. The Artistic Career of Corky (1916)

New York: As early as the second story, we are in New York. Bertie explains why:

You will notice, as you flit through these reminiscences of mine, that from time to time the scene of action is laid in and around the city of New York; and it is just possible that this may occasion the puzzled look and the start of surprise. ‘What,’ it is possible that you may ask yourselves, ‘is Bertram doing so far from his beloved native land?’

Well, it’s a fairly longish story; but, reefing it down a bit and turning it for the nonce into a two-reeler, what happened was that my Aunt Agatha on one occasion sent me over to America to try to stop young Gussie, my cousin, marrying a girl on the vaudeville stage, and I got the whole thing so mixed up that I decided it would be a sound scheme to stop on in New York for a bit instead of going back and having long, cosy chats with her about the affair.

So I sent Jeeves out to find a decent flat, and settled down for a spell of exile.

In this story Bertie gets Jeeves to help an American pal of his, Bruce ‘Corky’ Corcoran, an American artist who is failing to become a portrait painter and so living off an allowance from his rich uncle, Alexander Worple, who made his pile in jute.

Now Uncle Alexander is also a keen ornithologist so when Corky confides that he’s worried he (the uncle) won’t approve of his (Corky’s) new girlfriend (Muriel Singer), Jeeves comes up with the scheme of getting the girlfriend to write a children’s book of American birds full of praise for Uncle Alex’s works, wangle an invitation to dinner, and there pretend to meet Corky for the first time.

How could the old boy fail to a) approve of her b) bless the engagement of his nephew and such a wonderfully bird-literate young lady?

In the event, things don’t go according to plan because the uncle is so taken with the young lady (who turns out to be an unprincipled gold-digger) that he falls in love, proposes and marries her.

There is then a funny sequel when, months later, Bertie pops round to Corky’s studio and finds him carrying out his first ever portrait commission, to paint the newborn baby who is the offspring of Uncle Alexander and Muriel. Unfortunately he can’t keep his resentment out of the picture which ends up making the baby look like a drunken abortion.

Bertie is witness to the Uncle arriving to see the painting, blowing a gasket and storming out vowing to cut off Corky’s allowance forever. It’s at this point that Jeeves saves the day by suggesting that the baby is reimagined as a comic character and sent off to the newspapers who are always clamouring for new comic characters which can form the basis of long-running series in the Funny Papers. Jeeves suggests a suitably facile title for the series, ‘The Adventures of Baby Blobbs’.

3. Jeeves and the Unbidden Guest (1916)

New York: Bertie is visited by Lady Malvern, a friend of Aunt Agatha and very earnest investigator of social conditions. She introduces him to her useless feeble son, Wilmot, Lord Pershore aka Motty, who sits there feebly sucking his cane then drops the bombshell that she wants him (Bertie) to look after him (Motty) while she tours American prisons for a book she is writing. She reassures Bertie that Motty is a vegetarian, teetotaller, and quiet reader.

The joke is that as soon as Lady Malvern has departed, Motty turns into a party animal, insisting on going to nightclubs, staying out till all hours, getting hog-whimpering drunk and enacting all kinds of perilous pranks.

I’m a quiet, peaceful sort of bloke who has lived all his life in London, and I can’t stand the pace these swift sportsmen from the rural districts set. What I mean to say is, I’m all for rational enjoyment and so forth, but I think a chappie makes himself conspicuous when he throws soft-boiled eggs at the electric fan. And decent mirth and all that sort of thing are all right, but I do bar dancing on tables and having to dash all over the place dodging waiters, managers, and chuckers-out, just when you want to sit still and digest.

Motty reels back at all hours dead drunk, brings back to the apartment an aggressive bull-terrier he won in a raffle, and generally makes Bertie’s life so much of a misery that he moves out. But when he pops back a few days later, Jeeves tells him Motty assaulted a policeman and has been sentenced to 30 days in prison.

Lady Malvern reappears and Jeeves suggests they tell her Motty has gone to Boston for a few days. She listens to Bertie explaining all this then reveals that she was recently visiting Blackwell’s Island prison and saw Motty there, ‘dressed in a striped suit, seated beside a pile of stones with a hammer in his hands’.

Oops. That’s torn it! Lady Malvern launches into a diatribe against Bertie for corrupting her sweet innocent son but then Jeeves comes to the rescue with a new story. He explains that Bertie was merely repeating the cover story that he (Jeeves) and Motty gave him because, in reality, Motty is in prison doing undercover research to help his beloved mother with her book.

Lady Malvern hesitates for a moment and then buys it, apologises to Bertie, and all is well.

‘Jeeves,’ I said, ‘you are certainly a life-saver.’

4. Jeeves and the Hard-boiled Egg (1917)

New York: A friend of Bertie’s, Mr Francis Bickersteth aka Bicky, exists on a stipend from his uncle, His Grace the Duke of Chiswick, a stingy old man, what the Americans call ‘a hard-boiled egg’, hence the title. Bicky justifies his allowance by telling him whopping lies about how he’s forging a career in business. When the Duke announces he’s going to make a visit Bicky comes to Bertie for help.

Jeeves suggests that they pretend that Bertie’s apartment is really Bicky’s and Jeeves is Bicky’s valet, in order to impress his uncle and this they do. Trouble is it works too well and so the uncle announces he can obviously afford to cancel Bicky’s allowance now he is so successful, plunging the young man into despair.

Bicky has a comic obsession with starting a chicken farm (he keeps going on about how they breed like rabbits and how profitable eggs are) but Jeeves comes up with a rather more practical suggestion. Noting how keen Americans are to meet celebrities, he suggests they invite a convention of 87 gentlemen from Birdsburg, Missouri to shake the hand of a genu-INE British Duke for the very reasonable fee of $150.

Unfortunately the plan comes unstuck when the first batch of Birdsburgers give the scam away, the Duke is outraged, and throws them out. Once again things have reached their lowest point when Jeeves intervenes with a comment. He simply points out how much the American press would pay for this whole story if Bicky went to them with it – at which point the Duke hurriedly offers Bicky a secretarial job back in London. he tries to get away with it being unpaid but Bicky holds out for £500 a year and wins!

5. The Aunt and the Sluggard (1916)

New York: Bertie has a friend, Rockmetteller ‘Rocky’ Todd, a gentle souls who lives quietly in the country. One morning Bertie is rudely awakened by Rocky announcing he has a problem. (By this stage we are getting used to the shape of all these stories, the way his pals come to Bertie with problems which Jeeves, rather than he, manages to solve.)

Rocky’s problem is that his aunt in Illinois, Miss Isabel Rockmetteller, has told him she will give him a generous allowance on one condition: that he lives in New York and writes her weekly accounts of the wild time he is having there. Weak and retiring herself, she wants to enjoy the life of a big city partygoer at second hand.

Trouble is Rocky really is the shy and retiring type who hates the city and loves the simple life in the country where he can spend all day watching worms.

He was a poet. At least, he wrote poems when he did anything; but most of his time, as far as I could make out, he spent in a sort of trance. He told me once that he could sit on a fence, watching a worm and wondering what on earth it was up to for hours at a stretch.

Brought in for his advice, Jeeves suggests that he himself attends nightclubs and parties and writes exciting letters to the aunt and so it is agreed and so all goes well for some weeks, with Aunt Isabel loving the letters from her nephew who is obviously at the centre of New York’s giddy social whirl!

However, disaster strikes when Aunt Isabel unexpectedly arrives in New York and shows up at Bertie’s apartment which she has been led to believe belongs to Rocky. So Rocky, Bertie and Jeeves have to pretend it really is Rocky’s flat and Bertie moves to a hotel leaving Jeeves behind.

But obviously Rocky struggles badly to show his aunt the wild times he claimed to be having since he, in fact, knows no-one and never goes out. He calls in Bertie to help take her out for the evening but the aunt is clearly starting to suspect something…

Except that, in the comic conclusion of the story, it turns out that what is on her mind is not that she has been hoodwinked by her nephew but the fact that she recently went to an old-time revivalist meeting, led by the famous Jimmy Mundy, and has seen the light. She has realised that New York is a sink of corruption and iniquity.

‘He said that the tango and the fox-trot were devices of the devil to drag people down into the Bottomless Pit. He said that there was more sin in ten minutes with a negro banjo orchestra than in all the ancient revels of Nineveh and Babylon. And when he stood on one leg and pointed right at where I was sitting and shouted “This means you!” I could have sunk through the floor. I came away a changed woman.’

When she casually mentions that Ricky’s man Jeeves took her to the revivalist meeting by mistake we immediately realise it was no mistake, but another brilliant Jeeves wheeze for resolving a tricky situation.

Now she begs her nephew to forsake live in the City of Sin and adopt the simple life in some rural retreat. Which is what, of course, he wanted all along. Problem solved.

I was stunned by the man’s resource.
‘It’s brain,’ I said; ‘pure brain! What do you do to get like that, Jeeves? I believe you must eat a lot of fish, or something. Do you eat a lot of fish, Jeeves?’
‘No, sir.’

6. The Rummy Affair of Old Biffy (1924)

Paris: Suddenly we are in Paris. Bertie’s pal, Charles ‘Biffy’ Biffen is even more useless than most of his pals and can barely remember his own name. He calls on Bertie to moan that he fell in love with a model named Mabel on an ocean liner going to New York, proposed to her and she accepted but then they got separated at Customs and he forgot her surname and the hotel where she was staying and so lost contact.

Now he’s in Paris telling Bertie that he intends to sell the country house he inherited. Bertie shivers when Biffy tells him the best potential customer is Sir Roderick Glossop, the nerve specialist, because he (Bertie) had a narrow escape after accidentally getting engaged to Glossop’s imperious daughter, Honoria Glossop.

In the event Bertie is not surprised to read in The Times ten days later the announcement of Biffy’s engagement to marry Honoria. She’s snaffled him!

London Back in London Bertie is visited by Biffy who asks how Bertie got out of his engagement to Honoria. Bertie comes up with a plan. Knowing how fussy Sir Roderick is, Bertie suggests Biffy invites him for dinner, then offers a bouquet of flowers for him to smell which will include one of those toy flowers which squirt water in the face of the hapless victim. Sir Roderick will be so horrified at this asinine prank that he’ll cancel the marriage immediately.

Bertie is present at the fateful lunch and deeply disappointed when, at the last moment, Biffy chickens out and doesn’t press the squirter button. Instead he, Bertie and Sir Roderick decide to go and visit the current British Empire Exhibition (this was held from 23 April to 1 November 1924 and from 9 May to 31 October 1925.)

Bored with the exhibition Bertie and Biffy sneak off for a drink until Biffy spots a building called the Palace of Beauty and remembers that Jeeves suggested he go there. The place displays women dressed as famous characters from history and Biffy is astounded to see the girl he proposed to on the liner is one of the performers. The performers are behind glass which Biffy promptly smashes with his cane, to the great amusement of the visiting crowds and which swiftly attracts the police.

When Sir Roderick shows up, Bertie explains that Biffy has had a fit which achieves the desired effect i.e. Glossop forbids the marriage between Biffy and Honoria. The police hold Biffy in the cells overnight but next day he is released and reunited with his lady love.

All through this adventure, Jeeves had been surprisingly standoffish and reluctant to help. Now Bertie discovers this is because Jeeves was under the mistaken impression that Biffy had abandoned Mabel. When Bertie told him the facts, Jeeves realized his mistake and decided to help by directing Biffy to the exhibition display where he would see her and they could be reunited.

Bertie is grateful for all this and asks Jeeves how he knew Mabel in the first place. Jeeves surprises Bertie by replying that she is Jeeves’s niece, causing Bertie to almost crash the car.

7. Without the Option (1925)

On the evening of the annual Oxford-Cambridge Boat Race, Bertie goes on the razzle with his pal Oliver ‘Sippy’ Sipperley. Sippy is depressed because a) he is dependent for his lifestyle on an allowance from his Aunt Vera, Miss Sipperly, ‘an imperious and quick-tempered old lady; and b) through a series of lies he’s ended up committed to going and spending three weeks with some tedious friends of hers, the Pringles.

Bertie has a drunken inspiration and tells Sippy what he needs is a policeman’s helmet so they assault the nearest policeman and steal his helmet. The story opens the next morning after they’ve been arrested and spent the night in the cells. In court Bertie gets away with paying a £5 fine but Sippy – the one who carried out the actual assault, and who gave the authorities the ludicrous name Leon Trotzky to try and conceal his identity – is sentenced to thirty days in prison ‘without the option’ of paying a fine, hence the story’s title.

So Bertie goes home and tells Jeeves the situation: Aunt Vera had invited Sippy to go and sing in her village concert. Desperate to get out of it, Sippy invented a cock-and-bull story about having been commissioned to write a series of articles about Cambridge and so having to go there for 3 weeks. At which point Aunt Vera wrote back to say he really must stay with her friends, Professor and Mrs Pringle, and telling him she’d written to ask them if he (Sippy) could stay with him.

When Bertie (still suffering from a hangover) asks Jeeves for suggestions, Jeeves comes up with the obvious one: that Bertie impersonates Sippy and stays with the Pringles masquerading as his friend. Bertie protests but Jeeves informs him that the fearsome Aunt Agatha has been ringing up, wanting to know more about his involvement in some fracas with the police and this news panics Bertie into agreeing, telling Jeeves to pack his stuff, and catching the first train to Cambridge.

So he travels down to Cambridge, introduces himself to the Pringles as Sippy and they believe him. Things go alright to begin with but, as you can imagine, slowly the comic complications accumulate. The Pringles uniformly dislike him.

Professor Pringle was a thinnish, baldish, dyspeptic-lookingish cove with an eye like a haddock, while Mrs Pringle’s aspect was that of one who had had bad news round about the year 1900 and never really got over it.

To Bertie’s horror, their daughter resembles Honoria Glossop, another female with whom he’s had some close shaves, and he isn’t surprised to learn from Jeeves that she is Honoria’s cousin.

Honoria Glossop has a voice like a lion tamer making some authoritative announcement to one of the troupe, and so had this girl.

Heloise takes to flirting with Bertie who discovers there’s a drainpipe outside his bedroom window which he uses for getting in and out so as to avoid her.

The comic climax comes when none other than Sir Roderick Glossop (‘the loony doctor’) turns up on a visit. Bertie has an unfortunate history with Glossop because, in order to get out of an engagement to his daughter (Honoria) Bertie had pretended to be barking mad. But the real point is that Sir Roderick instantly recognises Bertie and announces that he has pulled a cruel practical joke on the Pringle household.

There’s no choice but for Bertie to come completely clean, admit he is not Oliver Sipperley, confess that he came to stay with them because Oliver is in prison after biffing a police officer. Surprisingly, that evening’s dinner goes ahead, albeit in a frosty atmosphere. At the end of the evening, when Bertie asks Jeeves for advice, the latter suggests they drive hot foot to see Sippy’s aunt, although she lives 150 miles away.

It has the advantage of getting Bertie out of the Pringle household so he jumps at the chance, packs his bags, makes his excuses, and they leg it. The comic denouement of the story is that when they arrive at Miss Sipperley’s place and confess all. To their surprise Miss Sipperley is pleased.

‘You aren’t annoyed?’ I said.
‘Annoyed?’ She chuckled happily. ‘I’ve never heard such a splendid thing in my life… If every young man in England went about hitting policemen in the stomach, it would be a better country to live in.’

Bertie is relieved but puzzled until, later that night at the inn where they’re staying, Jeeves explains that Miss Sipperley has been the victim of a particularly officious police officer, who has issued her summonses for exceeding the speed limit in her car; for allowing her dog to appear in public without a collar; and for failing to abate a smoky chimney.

And then goes further to explain that the police constable is Jeeves’s nephew, Egbert, and he slipped him a fiver to encourage him to be so officious to Miss Sipperley, thus triggering her anti-police feeling.

In other words, Jeeves has anticipated everything and fixed everything well in advance. Well done, Jeeves! Bertie gladly gives Jeeves £10 for his troubles.

8. Fixing it for Freddie (1925)

Freddie Bullivant is rejected by his fiancée Elizabeth Vickers, so Bertie invites him along on his annual holiday to Marvis Bay where he has taken a cottage for July and August. Only problem is that this Elizabeth Vickers shows up.

On the beach Bertie notices this Elizabeth playing with a toddler and deduces he must be a nephew or relation. So he has a brainwave for reuniting Freddie and Elizabeth, namely that when he returns to the beach and finds Elizabeth nowhere in sight, Bertie kidnaps the little boy and rushes back to his holiday home where he presents him to a startled Freddie. His plan is that Freddie can then take the toddler back to the house where she will be eternally grateful etc.

Only snag is that when Freddie returns the obnoxious little boy to Elizabeth, he discovers that he is not at all a relative of Elizabeth’s – she was just being friendly to a complete stranger on the beach, she thinks him lunatic to bring to her a child who has nothing to do with her, and so Freddie ends up even deeper into her bad books.

But worse is to come because not only does it turn out to be more difficult than expected to track down who exactly is the rightful owner of the little pest, but when Bertie eventually finds the holiday home and parents he belongs to, it turns out that the entire house is in quarantine because there’s a bad case of the mumps. The owner, a Mr Kegworthy, discovers that he and Bertie have relations in common and this is why he asks Bertie to look after the toddler until his uncle (who Kegworthy has telegramed) can turn up and take over.

Cue the predictable problems when hapless bachelors try to look after a problem child i.e. they have no idea what to feed him, no idea how to get him undressed, bathed or put to bed etc. In the event it turns out there’s a nanny looking after children in the neighbouring holiday cottage and Bertie is able to pay her to attend morning and evening to sort the kid out.

But they still haven’t reunited Freddy and Elizabeth until Jeeves returns from the cinema and says he saw a movie where a separated couple are reunited over love of their sweet little child. So he and Bertie conceive of getting Freddie and Elizabeth together and then getting the kid to say something soppy and sentimental at the right psychological moment. They decide to go with ‘Kiss Freddie’ as it’s so short. (It’s interesting that both of them see it as a scene from a movie complete with stage and camera directions.)

But they’re still in the middle of rehearsing the kids in his lines when, a few days later, Elizabeth passes the cottage on her way to the beach, sees the kid and asks Bertie (who she thinks is the father and doesn’t realise is a friend of Freddie’s) if she can step onto the veranda to say hello and also offer him some toffee. At which point the kid starts delivering its line – ‘Kiss Freddie, kiss Freddie!’ – and at that precise moment Freddie emerges from the cottage.

There is a horrible moment when the girl is stunned and then outraged, so Bertie proceeds to tell her their preposterous plan at which… she bursts out laughing. Bertie runs to fetch Jeeves and tell him it’s been a complete disaster except that by the time they get back to the cottage, they can see Freddie and Elizabeth locked in a passionate embrace. It worked!

9. Clustering Round Young Bingo (1925)

Bertie writes an article titled ‘What the Well-Dressed Man is Wearing’ for his Aunt Dahlia (aka Mrs George Travers) who runs a woman’s paper called Milady’s Boudoir.

The ‘arguing over clothes’ motif appears as Jeeves disapproves of Bertie ordering a dozen silk shirts to wear with evening dress, which Jeeves regards as infradig.

Meanwhile, the central plot contains several strands:

1) It turns out that Bingo’s wife, Rosie, has also written an article for Milady’s Boudoir, titled ‘How I Keep the Love of My Husband-Baby’, which largely consists of mocking him, so he wants Bertie’s advice on how to suppress it. To be precise, she has dictated the text into a dictaphone so it only exists as a recorded cylinder (the output from those devices) so is not yet on paper.

2) At the same time, Bingo’s wife needs a new housemaid.

3) Aunt Dahlia wants a new cook (and Bingo’s cook, Anatole, is a legend in the kitchen).

4) Aunt Dahlia’s husband i.e. Bertie’s Uncle George, is always overdoing his eating, needs to take regular visits to spas, so is heading off to Harrogate to take a rest cure and wants Bertie to accompany him, but Bertie doesn’t want to go, dreading the idea of being closeted for weeks with the old bore.

Jeeves suggests a solution: how about they persuade the legendary cook Anatole to quit Bingo’s place and go and work for Aunt Dahlia? Bingo’s wife will never forgive Aunt D for stealing her cook, and so will withdraw her humiliating article from Milady’s Boudoir. Reluctantly, Bingo agrees.

However there is a hitch. Jeeves reports back that Anatole refuses to leave because he is in love with Aunt Dahlia’s parlourmaid.

Still obsessing about his wife’s article, Bingo persuades Bertie to sneak through the window into his empty house and steal the cylinder from Rosie’s dictating machine. Unfortunately, Bertie is disturbed by the Littles’ pet Pekingese dog, knocks over a table packed with ornaments and generally makes an enormous racket. When he climbs out the window it is to be confronted by the parlourmaid who has fetched a policeman. There is a surprisingly restrained scene with the policeman who Bertie persuades to go into the house to find a photo of himself he claims is on the Littles’ sideboard and will establish that he is a friend of the family. When this can’t be found, Bertie simply runs away.

Jeeves recommends that Bertie should maybe join his Uncle George at Harrogate after all, to avoid getting tangled up in any more of Bingo’s schemes.

So Bertie spends two weeks in Harrogate where he meets Aunt Dahlia and Uncle Tom and is surprised to learn that Anatole has, after all, left the Littles to become her cook, even if it means Rosie Little will no longer talk to her.

Confused by this outcome, Bertie returns to London where Jeeves explains the rather complicated sequence of events. Remember that the Littles needed a new housemaid? Well Jeeves arranged for them to get a new one but for it to be a woman whose affections Anatole had once played with, getting engaged to her then disappearing. In other words, he now preferred to leave and willingly went to work for Aunt Dahlia.

For sorting everything out, Jeeves receives £20 from Bingo (for getting the humiliating article quashed – and because he happened to have won a spot on the horses), £25 from Aunt Dahlia (for getting the cook of her dreams), £10 from Rosie (for finding a satisfactory new parlourmaid), £25 from Uncle Tom (for finding the fabulous new cook) and £10 from Uncle George (for persuading Bertie to join him in Harrogate).

Bertie gives him a fiver into the bargain and then, as so often, there is the clothes punchline i.e. the silk shirts Bertie opened the story by telling us about and that Jeeves objected to? Jeeves says he has sent them back to the tailors (Peabody and Simms) and Bertie acquiesces, beaten again.

10. Bertie Changes His Mind (1922)

Jeeves abolishes Bertie’s thoughts about inviting his sister and her daughters (his nieces) to come and stay by arranging a humiliating fiasco at a girls’ school.

The internet tells me it is the only Jeeves and Wooster story to be narrated by Jeeves. The voice of the piece is, accordingly, completely different, sober and restrained instead of exuberant and slangy.

Bertie announces he is bored. He is bored of the same old Jeeves bringing the same old whiskey and soda in on the same old tray at the same old hour. He went to a play the other night which featured a lovely little girl clinging to her beloved Papa and it stirred a paternal feeling in the old bosom.

In a mad moment, Bertie wonders about adopting a child, which Jeeves jumps on, emphasising how complicated and long-drawn-out the process would be. But undeterred, when Bertie goes on to mention that his sister Mrs Scholfield and her three daughters will be arriving back from India next week, and floats the idea that they might come and stay, Jeeves is horrified. He suggests a restful break in Brighton which they embark on. But on the drive back Jeeves has arranged an elaborate wheeze.

Driving back they see a schoolgirl waving and stop to help. She introduces herself as Peggy Mainwaring and worries that she’ll get in trouble with her school’s headmistress, Miss Tomlinson, for bunking off. Jeeves suggests that they take Peggy for a drive before returning her to the school where Bertie can pretend to be a friend of the girl’s father.

This they do for a bit. When they roll up at the school, Jeeves mischievously tells Miss Tomlinson that Mr Wooster is an eminent figure and would be delighted to give a speech to the girls. Beforehand they have a smoke by the car in the school garage where 1) Bertie notices he’s mislaid his cigarette case and 2) Jeeves tells him of his experiences as a page boy in a school for young ladies where the girls stared and giggled at guests to make them uncomfortable.

So it is a nervous and discombobulated Bertie who takes to the school stage. And indeed his speech is beyond appalling as he doesn’t even know what he’s meant to be speaking about. The only moment when he finds his feet is when Miss Tomlinson (desperately) hisses at him to offer the girls some advice and the first thing that comes to Bertie’s mind is a horseracing tip before launching into what is obviously going to be a risqué story about a stockbroker and a chorus girl, at which point a furious Miss Tomlinson interrupts him.

Bertie legs it out to the garage where Jeeves calmly announces that the car is fixed and ready to go. Bertie hides under the rug in the back as they hear angry voices approaching. Remember the missing cigarette case? Jeeves arranged for Rosie to take it and hand round cigarettes to her pals in a way that made it look like Bertie was encouraging Miss Tomlinson’s girls to smoke. When she asks where Bertie is, Jeeves disclaims all knowledge. After she’s reluctantly left, Jeeves jumps in the jalopy and they make their getaway.

A week later at the flat, Bertie comments how cosy and pleasant it is just the two of them living in bachelor bliss. When Jeeves asks if Bertie has found a suitable house where he can live with his sister and three nieces. With a shudder, Bertie tells Jeeves that he has changed his mind.

Cast

• Bertie Wooster
  • Jeeves – his valet
• Florence Craye
• Lord Worplesdon – Florence’s temperamental father
• Edwin – Florence’s young brother, fourteen now and had just joined the Boy Scouts – ‘a ferret-faced kid, whom I had disliked since birth’
• Uncle Willoughby – Bertie’s uncle, owner of Easeby, writing a family history
  • Oakshott, the butler
• Aubrey Fothergill – friend of Bertie’s
  • Meekyn – his valet
• Bruce ‘Corky’ Corcoran- American artist in New York, failing to be a portrait painter and so living off an allowance from…
• Alexander Worple – Corky’s uncle, made his pile in jute, as a hobby is an expert ornithologist of American birds
• Miss Muriel Singer – Corky’s girlfriend, chorus girl – ‘in the chorus of that show Choose your Exit at the Manhattan’
• Lady Malvern – friend of Aunt Agatha – ‘a hearty, happy, healthy, overpowering sort of dashed female, not so very tall but making up for it by measuring about six feet from the O. P. to the Prompt Side. She fitted into my biggest arm-chair as if it had been built round her by someone who knew they were wearing arm-chairs tight about the hips that season’
• Wilmot, Lord Pershore aka Motty – her son
• Rollo – the bull-terrier Motty wins in a raffle
• Rocky Todd – pal Bertie goes to stay with – ‘a rummy sort of a chap who lives all alone in the wilds of Long Island’
• Mr Francis Bickersteth aka Bicky
• the Duke of Chiswick – Bicky’s uncle
• Rockmetteller ‘Rocky’ Todd – ‘Constitutionally the laziest young devil in America, he had hit on a walk in life which enabled him to go the limit in that direction. He was a poet’
• Isabel Rockmetteller – Rocky’s stern aunt
• Charles Edward Biffen – ‘Old Biffy’ – ‘As vague and woollen-headed a blighter as ever bit a sandwich’ I’m no master-mind myself but compared with Biffy I’m one of the great thinkers of all time
• Sir Roderick Glossop – the great nerve specialist whose daughter, Honoria, Bertie was briefly engaged to
• Oliver Randolph Sipperley
• Professor Pringle – in Cambridge – ‘a thinnish, baldish, dyspeptic-lookingish cove with an eye like a haddock’
• Mrs Pringle – her ‘aspect was that of one who had had bad news round about the year 1900 and never really got over it’
• Heloise Pringle – daughter – unnervingly reminiscent of Honoria Glossop
• Pringle’s aged mother
• Pringle’s Aunt Jane
• Egbert – a police constable and cousin of Jeeves’s
• Mr Freddie Bullivant – engaged to…
• Miss Elizabeth Vickers
• Aunt Dahlia – Dahlia Travers, wife of (Uncle) Tom Travers, editor of Milady’s Boudoir
• Tom Travers – husband of Dahlia Travers and thus Bertie Wooster’s uncle, Uncle Tom – made a fortune doing business in the Far East and funds his wife’s magazine Milady’s Boudoir
• Anatole – Bingo Little’s outstanding French cook
• Uncle George Wooster – always overeating and having to be sent off to spas
• Mrs Schofield – Bertie’s sister (her only mention in the canon)
• Peggy Mainwaring – schoolgirl Jeeves and Bertie pick up in their car
• Miss Tomlinson – headmistress of the girls’ school in ‘Bertie Changes His Mind’

Aspects of their characters

Jeeves smiled paternally. Or, rather, he had a kind of paternal muscular spasm about the mouth, which is the nearest he ever gets to smiling.

Bertie: I’m a quiet, peaceful sort of bloke who has lived all his life in London.

In New York Bertie stays on 57th street.

For the first time in our long connection I observed Jeeves almost smile. The corner of his mouth curved quite a quarter of an inch, and for a moment his eye ceased to look like a meditative fish’s.

I was sitting in the apartment one afternoon, about a month after the thing had started, smoking a cigarette and resting the old bean, when the door opened and the voice of Jeeves burst the silence like a bomb. It wasn’t that he spoke loud. He has one of those soft, soothing voices that slide through the atmosphere like the note of a far-off sheep.

There was the faintest flutter of sound in the background. It was the respectful cough with which Jeeves announces that he is about to speak without having been spoken to.

Bertie: ‘I know perfectly well that I’ve got, roughly speaking, half the amount of brain a normal bloke ought to possess.’

Now, those who know me, if you ask them, will tell you that I’m a chump. My Aunt Agatha would testify to this effect. So would my Uncle Percy and many more of my nearest and—if you like to use the expression—dearest. Well, I don’t mind. I admit it. I am a chump.

Aunts and uncles

It’s a curious thing how many of my pals seem to have aunts and uncles who are their main source of supply. There is Bicky for one, with his uncle the Duke of Chiswick; Corky, who, until things went wrong, looked to Alexander Worple, the bird specialist, for sustenance. And I shall be telling you a story shortly of a dear old friend of mine, Oliver Sipperley, who had an aunt in Yorkshire. These things cannot be mere coincidence. They must be meant. What I’m driving at is that Providence seems to look after the chumps of this world; and, personally, I’m all for it. I suppose the fact is that, having been snootered from infancy upwards by my own aunts, I like to see that it is possible for these relatives to have a better and a softer side.

Sippy is by way of being an author, though mainly dependent for the necessaries of life on subsidies from an old aunt who lives in the country, and his conversation often takes a literary turn.

Bertie’s cheerful philistinism

I remember, as a kid, having to learn by heart a poem about a bird by the name of Eugene Aram, who had the deuce of a job in this respect. All I can recall of the actual poetry is the bit that goes:

Tum-tum, tum-tum, tum-tumty-tum,
I slew him, tum-tum tum!

‘Sam Patterson would do it for a hundred dollars. He writes a novelette, three short stories, and ten thousand words of a serial for one of the all-fiction magazines under different names every month.’

The older I get, the more I agree with Shakespeare and those poet Johnnies about it always being darkest before the dawn and there’s a silver lining and what you lose on the swings you make up on the roundabouts.

I’m not absolutely certain of my facts, but I rather fancy it’s Shakespeare—or, if not, it’s some equally brainy bird—who says that it’s always just when a fellow is feeling particularly braced with things in general that Fate sneaks up behind him with the bit of lead piping.

The situation floored me. I’m not denying it. Hamlet must have felt much as I did when his father’s ghost bobbed up in the fairway.

Who was that lad they used to try to make me read at Oxford? Ship—Shop—Schopenhauer. That’s the name. A grouch of the most pronounced description.

‘Emerson,’ I reminded him, ‘says a friend may well be reckoned the masterpiece of Nature, sir.’
‘Well, you can tell Emerson from me next time you see him that he’s an ass.’
‘Very good, sir.’

‘Jeeves, have you seen that play called I-forget-its-dashed-name?’
‘No, sir.’
‘It’s on at the What-d’you-call-it. I went last night.’

Slang

I was reluctantly compelled to hand the misguided blighter the mitten. [fire, sack]

Uncle Willoughby had been somewhat on the tabasco side as a young man. [wild]

‘Oh, Jeeves,’ I said; ‘about that check suit.’
‘Yes, sir?’
‘Is it really a frost?’ [no go, inappropriate]

Now, a great many fellows think that having a rich uncle is a pretty soft snap.

He has got a pippin of an idea… [corker, good one]

Time, instead of working the healing wheeze, went and pulled the most awful bone and put the lid on it.

‘Promising Young Artist Beans Baby With Axe.’ [brains, hits on head with]

For perhaps a minute there was one of the scaliest silences I’ve ever run up against.
That was one of the scaliest affairs I was ever mixed up with…

I gave Motty the swift east-to-west.

Motty was under the surface. Completely sozzled. [drunk]

Devilish efficient sort of bird, and looked on in commercial circles as quite the nib!’ [bee’s knees, top thing]

It will show you pretty well how pipped I was when I tell you that I as near as a toucher put on a white tie with a dinner-jacket.

‘Aren’t you bucked?’ I said.
‘Bucked!’
‘If I were in your place I should be frightfully braced.

The old boy came to lunch here to give me the once-over, and Jeeves arranged matters so that he went away firmly convinced that I was off my onion.’ [mad]

Biffy’s first slosh smashed the glass all to a hash.

‘It’s all right,’ I said. ‘Poor old Biffy’s only gone off his crumpet.’ [mad]

Honoria was the daughter of Sir Roderick Glossop, the loony-doctor, and I had been engaged to her for about three weeks, much against my wishes, when the old boy most fortunately got the idea that I was off my rocker and put the bee on the proceedings. [ended]

‘The bit about soft silk shirts got in amongst him a trifle; but you can take it from me, Aunt Dahlia, that they are the latest yodel and will be much seen at first nights and other occasions where Society assembles.’

Jeeves’s mysterious modes of locomotion

I rang the bell. ‘Sir?’ said Jeeves, kind of manifesting himself. One of the rummy things about Jeeves is that, unless you watch like a hawk, you very seldom see him come into a room. He’s like one of those weird birds in India who dissolve themselves into thin air and nip through space in a sort of disembodied way and assemble the parts again just where they want them.

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.

Then he seemed to flicker, and wasn’t there any longer.

Jeeves shimmered out…

It was Jeeves. He had shimmered in, carrying my evening things…

Jeeves had projected himself into the background.

Jeeves flowed in…

Jeeves floated silently into the dining-room…

Jeeves had projected himself in from the dining-room and materialized on the rug.

At this juncture the door-bell rang. Jeeves floated out to answer it.

Jeeves filtered in with the tea.

In this matter of shimmering into rooms the man is rummy to a degree. You’re sitting in the old arm-chair, thinking of this and that, and then suddenly you look up, and there he is. He moves from point to point with as little uproar as a jelly-fish.

Jeeves flowed in with the tray, like some silent stream meandering over its mossy bed.

Jeeves projected himself into the room with the tea.

It was all so home-like when he floated noiselessly into the room that I nearly broke down.

Then he streamed imperceptibly towards the door and flowed silently out.

‘Indeed, sir?’ said Jeeves. And, with not another word, he slid out.

Stunts

As you might have noticed, I’ve singled out the use of the word ‘stunt’ in other 1920s authors, specifically Agatha Christie. At that time ‘stunt’ denoted ‘anything done with the intention of improving or advertising one’s image or gaining an advantage over rivals, a gimmick or device for attracting attention.’

‘My private impression is that, without knowing it, I’ve worked that stunt that Sargent used to pull—painting the soul of the sitter.’

Comic phrases

It was one of those still evenings you get in the summer, when you can hear a snail clear its throat a mile away.

Uncle Willoughby meandered back to the library, and there was a silence that you could have dug bits out of with a spoon.

I went to my room and rang for Jeeves. He came in looking as if nothing had happened or was ever going to happen. He was the calmest thing in captivity.

‘This is the first time I’ve been let out alone, and I mean to make the most of it. We’re only young once. Why interfere with life’s morning? Young man, rejoice in thy youth! Tra-la! What ho!’
Put like that, it did seem reasonable.

Won’t you have an egg or something? Or a sausage or something? Or something?’
‘No, thank you.’
She spoke as if she belonged to an anti-sausage society or a league for the suppression of eggs.

Bicky rocked like a jelly in a high wind.

He picked up his glass and drained it feverishly, overlooking the fact that it hadn’t anything in it.

The chappie writhed like an electric fan.

She looked at me in rather a rummy way. It was a nasty look. It made me feel as if I were something the dog had brought in and intended to bury later on, when he had time.

‘On the liner going to New York I met a girl.’ Biffy made a sort of curious gulping noise not unlike a bulldog trying to swallow half a cutlet in a hurry so as to be ready for the other half.

Honoria, you see, is one of those robust, dynamic girls with the muscles of a welterweight and a laugh like a squadron of cavalry charging over a tin bridge. A beastly thing to have to face over the breakfast table.

I never met a man who had such a knack of making a fellow feel like a waste-product.

The whole strength of the company gazed at me like a family group out of one of Edgar Allan Poe’s less cheery yarns, and I felt my joie de vivre dying at the roots.

It was what happened in the case of Honoria Glossop. She was notoriously one of the brainiest women of her year at Girton, and she just gathered me in like a bull pup swallowing a piece of steak.’

She had had her back to me, and at the sound of my voice she executed a sort of leap or bound, not unlike a barefoot dancer who steps on a tin-tack half-way through the Vision of Salome.

The policeman was regarding me in a boiled way.

Comic critiques of privilege

The stories overflow with entertaining critiques of Bertie’s character, often from his own mouth – but some of them have the extra pointedness of making him stand for an entire decadent class of faineant slackers.

‘Aunt Isabel doesn’t like you. She asked me what you did for a living. And when I told her you didn’t do anything she said she thought as much, and that you were a typical specimen of a useless and decaying aristocracy.’

Describing how the valet he had before Jeeves, came back from a Christian revivalist meeting:

I remember, back in England, the man I had before Jeeves sneaked off to a meeting on his evening out and came back and denounced me in front of a crowd of chappies I was giving a bit of supper to as a useless blot on the fabric of Society.

Heloise Pringle reports of Bertie that:

‘The man surely can’t be so interesting a companion as all that. Uncle Roderick says he is an invertebrate waster.’

And even the dimwit Bertie is given a comic passage where he’s dimly aware of the fantastically privileged life he leads.

As I stood in my lonely bedroom at the hotel, trying to tie my white tie myself, it struck me for the first time that there must be whole squads of chappies in the world who had to get along without a man to look after them. I’d always thought of Jeeves as a kind of natural phenomenon; but, by Jove! of course, when you come to think of it, there must be quite a lot of fellows who have to press their own clothes themselves, and haven’t got anybody to bring them tea in the morning, and so on. It was rather a solemn thought, don’t you know. I mean to say, ever since then I’ve been able to appreciate the frightful privations the poor have to stick.

Compare and contrast with the appalling privations described in the pioneering work of social documentary, Life As We Have Known It, which describes working class existence around the same time.

• Life As We Have Known It: The Voices of Working-Class Women edited by Margaret Llewelyn Davies (1931)

Freud

If you’ve read my Agatha Christie reviews you’ll know I’m noting the spread of references to Freud in popular fiction of the 1920s. Here’s one from ‘The Rummy Affair of Old Biffy’ published in 1924.

The sort of girl who reduces you to pulp with sixteen sets of tennis and a few rounds of golf and then comes down to dinner as fresh as a daisy, expecting you to take an intelligent interest in Freud.

Mind you the point about Honoria, the girl in question, is that her father is a nerve specialist aka psychiatrist, so it’s a pertinent reference. But also an interesting indication of how Freud’s name had percolated through to popular culture.

Related links

• Carry On, Jeeves online
• P.G. Wodehouse website
• P.G. Wodehouse society
• List of recurring characters in the Jeeves stories

Related reviews

• P.G. Wodehouse reviews