and putting myself under police protection, I went.

  59

  P. G. WODEHOUSE

  When we got to the fl at, there was Mrs. Bobbie looking – well,

  I tell you, it staggered me. Her gold hair was all piled up in waves

  and crinkles and things, with a what-d’-you-call-it of diamonds in

  it. And she was wearing the most perfectly ripping dress. I couldn’t

  begin to describe it. I can only say it was the limit. It struck me that

  if this was how she was in the habit of looking every night when they

  were dining quietly at home together, it was no wonder that Bobbie

  liked domesticity.

  “Here’s old Reggie, dear,” said Bobbie. “I’ve brought him home

  to have a bit of dinner. I’ll phone down to the kitchen and ask them

  to send it up now – what?”

  She stared at him as if she had never seen him before. Th

  en she

  turned scarlet. Th

  en she turned as white as a sheet. Th

  en she gave

  a little laugh. It was most interesting to watch. Made me wish I was up a tree about eight hundred miles away. Th

  en she recovered

  herself.

  “I am so glad you were able to come, Mr. Pepper,” she said, smil-

  ing at me.

  And after that she was all right. At least, you would have said so.

  She talked a lot at dinner, and chaff ed Bobbie, and played us ragtime

  on the piano afterwards, as if she hadn’t a care in the world. Quite

  a jolly little party it was – not. I’m no lynx-eyed sleuth, and all that

  sort of thing, but I had seen her face at the beginning, and I knew

  that she was working the whole time and working hard, to keep

  herself in hand, and that she would have given that diamond what’s-

  its-name in her hair and everything else she possessed to have one

  good scream – just one. I’ve sat through some pretty thick evenings

  in my time, but that one had the rest beaten in a canter. At the very

  earliest moment I grabbed my hat and got away.

  Having seen what I did, I wasn’t particularly surprised to meet

  Bobbie at the club next day looking about as merry and bright as a

  lonely gum-drop at an Eskimo tea-party.

  He started in straightway. He seemed glad to have someone to

  talk to about it.

  “Do you know how long I’ve been married?” he said.

  I didn’t exactly.

  “About a year, isn’t it?”

  “Not about a year,” he said sadly. “Exactly a year – yesterday!”

  Th

  en I understood. I saw light – a regular fl ash of light.

  60

  MY MAN JEEVES

  “Yesterday was—?”

  “Th

  e anniversary of the wedding. I’d arranged to take Mary to

  the Savoy, and on to Covent Garden. She particularly wanted to

  hear Caruso. I had the ticket for the box in my pocket. Do you

  know, all through dinner I had a kind of rummy idea that there was

  something I’d forgotten, but I couldn’t think what?”

  “Till your wife mentioned it?”

  He nodded—

  “She – mentioned it,” he said thoughtfully.

  I didn’t ask for details. Women with hair and chins like Mary’s

  may be angels most of the time, but, when they take off their wings

  for a bit, they aren’t half-hearted about it.

  “To be absolutely frank, old top,” said poor old Bobbie, in a bro-

  ken sort of way, “my stock’s pretty low at home.”

  Th

  ere didn’t seem much to be done. I just lit a cigarette and sat

  there. He didn’t want to talk. Presently he went out. I stood at the

  window of our upper smoking-room, which looks out on to Pic-

  cadilly, and watched him. He walked slowly along for a few yards,

  stopped, then walked on again, and fi nally turned into a jeweller’s.

  Which was an instance of what I meant when I said that deep down

  in him there was a certain stratum of sense.

  %

  It was from now on that I began to be really interested in this

  problem of Bobbie’s married life. Of course, one’s always mildly in-

  terested in one’s friends’ marriages, hoping they’ll turn out well and

  all that; but this was diff erent. Th

  e average man isn’t like Bobbie,

  and the average girl isn’t like Mary. It was that old business of the

  immovable mass and the irresistible force. Th

  ere was Bobbie, am-

  bling gently through life, a dear old chap in a hundred ways, but

  undoubtedly a chump of the fi rst water.

  And there was Mary, determined that he shouldn’t be a chump.

  And Nature, mind you, on Bobbie’s side. When Nature makes a

  chump like dear old Bobbie, she’s proud of him, and doesn’t want

  her handiwork disturbed. She gives him a sort of natural armour to

  protect him against outside interference. And that armour is short-

  ness of memory. Shortness of memory keeps a man a chump, when,

  but for it, he might cease to be one. Take my case, for instance. I’m

  a chump. Well, if I had remembered half the things people have

  61

  P. G. WODEHOUSE

  tried to teach me during my life, my size in hats would be about

  number nine. But I didn’t. I forgot them. And it was just the same

  with Bobbie.

  For about a week, perhaps a bit more, the recollection of that

  quiet little domestic evening bucked him up like a tonic. Elephants,

  I read somewhere, are champions at the memory business, but they

  were fools to Bobbie during that week. But, bless you, the shock

  wasn’t nearly big enough. It had dinted the armour, but it hadn’t

  made a hole in it. Pretty soon he was back at the old game.

  It was pathetic, don’t you know. Th

  e poor girl loved him, and

  she was frightened. It was the thin edge of the wedge, you see, and

  she knew it. A man who forgets what day he was married, when he’s

  been married one year, will forget, at about the end of the fourth,

  that he’s married at all. If she meant to get him in hand at all, she

  had got to do it now, before he began to drift away.

  I saw that clearly enough, and I tried to make Bobbie see it,

  when he was by way of pouring out his troubles to me one afternoon.

  I can’t remember what it was that he had forgotten the day before,

  but it was something she had asked him to bring home for her – it

  may have been a book.

  “It’s such a little thing to make a fuss about,” said Bobbie. “And

  she knows that it’s simply because I’ve got such an infernal memory

  about everything. I can’t remember anything. Never could.”

  He talked on for a while, and, just as he was going, he pulled out

  a couple of sovereigns.

  “Oh, by the way,” he said.

  “What’s this for?” I asked, though I knew.

  “I owe it you.”

  “How’s that?” I said.

  “Why, that bet on Tuesday. In the billiard-room. Murray and

  Brown were playing a hundred up, and I gave you two to one that

  Brown would win, and Murray beat him by twenty odd.”

  “So you do remember some things?” I said.

  He got quite excited. Said that if I thought he was the sort of

  rotter who forgot to pay when he lost a bet, it was pretty rotten of me

  after knowing him all these years, and a lot more like that.

  “Subside, laddie,” I said.

  Th

  en I spoke to him like a father.

  62

  MY MAN JEEVES

  “What you’ve got to do, my old college chum,” I said, “is to pull

  yourself together, and jolly quick, too. As things are shaping, you’re

  due for a nasty knock before you know what’s hit you. You’ve got to

  make an eff ort. Don’t say you can’t. Th

  is two quid business shows

  that, even if your memory is rocky, you can remember some things.

  What you’ve got to do is to see that wedding anniversaries and so

  on are included in the list. It may be a brainstrain, but you can’t get

  out of it.”

  “I suppose you’re right,” said Bobbie. “But it beats me why she

  thinks such a lot of these rotten little dates. What’s it matter if I forgot what day we were married on or what day she was born on or

  what day the cat had the measles? She knows I love her just as much

  as if I were a memorizing freak at the halls.”

  “Th

  at’s not enough for a woman,” I said. “Th

  ey want to be

  shown. Bear that in mind, and you’re all right. Forget it, and there’ll

  be trouble.”

  He chewed the knob of his stick.

  “Women are frightfully rummy,” he said gloomily.

  “You should have thought of that before you married one,” I

  said.

  %

  I don’t see that I could have done any more. I had put the whole

  thing in a nutshell for him. You would have thought he’d have seen

  the point, and that it would have made him brace up and get a hold

  on himself. But no. Off he went again in the same old way. I gave up

  arguing with him. I had a good deal of time on my hands, but not

  enough to amount to anything when it was a question of reforming

  dear old Bobbie by argument. If you see a man asking for trouble,

  and insisting on getting it, the only thing to do is to stand by and

  wait till it comes to him. After that you may get a chance. But till

  then there’s nothing to be done. But I thought a lot about him.

  Bobbie didn’t get into the soup all at once. Weeks went by, and

  months, and still nothing happened. Now and then he’d come into

  the club with a kind of cloud on his shining morning face, and I’d

  know that there had been doings in the home; but it wasn’t till well

  on in the spring that he got the thunderbolt just where he had been

  asking for it – in the thorax.

  63

  P. G. WODEHOUSE

  I was smoking a quiet cigarette one morning in the window

  looking out over Piccadilly, and watching the buses and motors go-

  ing up one way and down the other – most interesting it is; I often

  do it – when in rushed Bobbie, with his eyes bulging and his face the

  colour of an oyster, waving a piece of paper in his hand.

  “Reggie,” he said. “Reggie, old top, she’s gone!”

  “Gone!” I said. “Who?”

  “Mary, of course! Gone! Left me! Gone!”

  “Where?” I said.

  Silly question? Perhaps you’re right. Anyhow, dear old Bobbie

  nearly foamed at the mouth.

  “Where? How should I know where? Here, read this.”

  He pushed the paper into my hand. It was a letter.

  “Go on,” said Bobbie. “Read it.”

  So I did. It certainly was quite a letter. Th

  ere was not much of it,

  but it was all to the point. Th

  is is what it said:

  My Dear Bobbie,

  I am going away. When you care enough about me to remember to

  wish me many happy returns on my birthday, I will come back. My

  address will be Box 341, London Morning News.

  I read it twice, then I said, “Well, why don’t you?”

  “Why don’t I what?”

  “Why don’t you wish her many happy returns? It doesn’t seem

  much to ask.”

  “But she says on her birthday.”

  “Well, when is her birthday?”

  “Can’t you understand?” said Bobbie. “I’ve forgotten.”

  “Forgotten!” I said.

  “Yes,” said Bobbie. “Forgotten.”

  “How do you mean, forgotten?” I said. “Forgotten whether it’s

  the twentieth or the twenty-fi rst, or what? How near do you get to

  it?”

  “I know it came somewhere between the fi rst of January and the

  thirty-fi rst of December. Th

  at’s how near I get to it.”

  “Th

  ink.”

  “Th

  ink? What’s the use of saying ‘Th

  ink’? Th

  ink I haven’t

  thought? I’ve been knocking sparks out of my brain ever since I opened that letter.”

  64

  MY MAN JEEVES

  “And you can’t remember?”

  “No.”

  I rang the bell and ordered restoratives.

  “Well, Bobbie,” I said, “it’s a pretty hard case to spring on an

  untrained amateur like me. Suppose someone had come to Sherlock

  Holmes and said, ‘Mr. Holmes, here’s a case for you. When is my

  wife’s birthday?’ Wouldn’t that have given Sherlock a jolt? However,

  I know enough about the game to understand that a fellow can’t

  shoot off his deductive theories unless you start him with a clue, so

  rouse yourself out of that pop-eyed trance and come across with two

  or three. For instance, can’t you remember the last time she had a

  birthday? What sort of weather was it? Th

  at might fi x the month.”

  Bobbie shook his head.

  “It was just ordinary weather, as near as I can recollect.”

  “Warm?”

  “Warmish.”

  “Or cold?”

  “Well, fairly cold, perhaps. I can’t remember.”

  I ordered two more of the same. Th

  ey seemed indicated in the

  Young Detective’s Manual. “You’re a great help, Bobbie,” I said. “An

  invaluable assistant. One of those indispensable adjuncts without

  which no home is complete.”

  Bobbie seemed to be thinking.

  “I’ve got it,” he said suddenly. “Look here. I gave her a present

  on her last birthday. All we have to do is to go to the shop, hunt up

  the date when it was bought, and the thing’s done.”

  “Absolutely. What did you give her?”

  He sagged.

  “I can’t remember,” he said.

  Getting ideas is like golf. Some days you’re right off , others it’s

  as easy as falling off a log. I don’t suppose dear old Bobbie had ever

  had two ideas in the same morning before in his life; but now he

  did it without an eff ort. He just loosed another dry Martini into the

  undergrowth, and before you could turn round it had fl ushed quite

  a brain-wave.

  Do you know those little books called When were you Born?

  Th

  ere’s one for each month. Th

  ey tell you your character, your tal-

  ents, your strong points, and your weak points at fourpence halfpen-

  ny a go. Bobbie’s idea was to buy the whole twelve, and go through

  65

  P. G. WODEHOUSE

  them till we found out which month hit off Mary’s character. Th

  at

  would give us the month, and narrow it down a whole lot.

  A pretty hot idea for a non-thinker like dear old Bobbie. We sal-

  lied out at once. He took half and I took half, and we settled down

  to work. As I say, it sounded good. But when we came to go into the

  thing, we saw that there was a fl aw. Th

  ere was plenty of information

  all right, but there wasn’t a single month that didn’t have something

  that exactly hit off Mary. For instance, in the December book it

  said, “December people are apt to keep their own secrets. Th

  ey are

  extensive travellers.” Well, Mary had certainly kept her secret, and

  she had travelled quite extensively enough for Bobbie’s needs. Th

  en,

  October people were “born with original ideas” and “loved moving.”

  You couldn’t have summed up Mary’s little jaunt more neatly. Feb-

  ruary people had “wonderful memories” – Mary’s speciality.

  We took a bit of a rest, then had another go at the thing.

  Bobbie was all for May, because the book said that women born

  in that month were “inclined to be capricious, which is always a

  barrier to a happy married life”; but I plumped for February, be-

  cause February women “are unusually determined to have their own

  way, are very earnest, and expect a full return in their companion or

  mates.” Which he owned was about as like Mary as anything could

  be.

  In the end he tore the books up, stamped on them, burnt them,

  and went home.

  It was wonderful what a change the next few days made in dear

  old Bobbie. Have you ever seen that picture, “Th

  e Soul’s Awaken-

  ing”? It represents a fl apper of sorts gazing in a startled sort of way

  into the middle distance with a look in her eyes that seems to say,

  “Surely that is George’s step I hear on the mat! Can this be love?”

  Well, Bobbie had a soul’s awakening too. I don’t suppose he had ever

  troubled to think in his life before – not really think. But now he was wearing his brain to the bone. It was painful in a way, of course,

  to see a fellow human being so thoroughly in the soup, but I felt

  strongly that it was all for the best. I could see as plainly as possible

  that all these brainstorms were improving Bobbie out of knowledge.

  When it was all over he might possibly become a rotter again of a

  sort, but it would only be a pale refl ection of the rotter he had been.

 

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