g unit the heave-ho but pass the word round to the other boards and syndicates. 'Herring?' the latter say when Kipper comes seeking employment. 'Isn't he the bimbo who took the bread out of the mouths of the Thursday Review people? Chuck the blighter out of the window and we want to see him bounce.' If this action of Upjohn's went through, his chances of any sort of salaried post were meagre, if not slim. It might be years before all was forgiven and forgotten. 'Selling pencils in the gutter is about the best I'll be able to look forward to,' said Kipper, and he had just buried his face in his hands, as fellows are apt to do when contemplating a future that's a bit on the bleak side, when the door opened, to reveal not, as I had expected, Aunt Dahlia, but Bobbie. 'I got the wrong book,' she said. 'The one I wanted was -' Then her eye fell on Kipper and she stiffened in every limb, rather like Lot's wife, who, as you probably know, did the wrong thing that time there was all that unpleasantness with the cities of the plain and got turned into a pillar of salt, though what was the thought behind this I've never been able to understand. Salt, I mean. Seems so bizarre somehow and not at all what you would expect. 'Oh!' she said haughtily, as if offended by this glimpse into the underworld, and even as she spoke a hollow groan burst from Kipper's interior and he raised an ashen face. And at the sight of that ashen f. the haughtiness went out of Roberta Wickham with a whoosh, to be replaced by all the old love, sympathy, womanly tenderness and what not, and she bounded at him like a leopardess getting together with a lost cub. 'Reggie! Oh, Reggie! Reggie, darling, what is it?' she cried, her whole demeanour undergoing a marked change for the better. She was, in short, melted by his distress, as so often happens with the female sex. Poets have frequently commented on this. You are probably familiar with the one who said 'Oh, woman in our hours of ease turn tumty tiddly something please, when something something something something brow, a something something something thou.' She turned on me with an animal snarl. 'What have you been doing to the poor lamb?' she demanded, giving me one of the nastiest looks seen that summer in the midland counties, and I had just finished explaining that it was not I but Fate or Destiny that had removed the sunshine from the poor lamb's life, when Aunt Dahlia returned. She had a slip of paper in her hand. 'I was right,' she said. 'I knew Upjohn's first move on getting a book published would be to subscribe to a press-cutting agency. I found this on the hall table. It's your review of his slim volume, young Herring, and having run an eye over it I'm not surprised that he's a little upset. I'll read it to you.' As might have been expected, this having been foreshadowed a good deal in one way and another, what Kipper had written was on the severe side, and as far as I was concerned it fell into the rare and refreshing fruit class. I enjoyed every minute of it. It concluded as follows: 'Aubrey Upjohn might have taken a different view of preparatory schools if he had done a stretch at the Dotheboys Hall conducted by him at Malvern House, Bramley-on-Sea, as we had the misfortune to do. We have not forgotten the sausages on Sunday, which were made not from contented pigs but from pigs which had expired, regretted by all, of glanders, the botts and tuberculosis.' Until this passage left the aged relative's lips Kipper had been sitting with the tips of his fingers together, nodding from time to time as much as to say 'Caustic, yes, but perfectly legitimate criticism,' but on hearing this excerpt he did another of his sitting high jumps, lowering all previous records by several inches. It occurred to me as a passing thought that if all other sources of income failed, he had a promising future as an acrobat. 'But I never wrote that,' he gasped. 'Well, it's here in cold print.' 'Why, that's libellous!' 'So Upjohn and his legal eagle seem to feel. And I must say it reads like a pretty good five thousand pounds' worth to me.' 'Let me look at that,' yipped Kipper. 'I don't understand this. No, half a second, darling. Not now. Later. I want to concentrate,' he said, for Bobbie had flung herself on him and was clinging to him like the ivy on the old garden wall. 'Reggie!' she wailed - yes, wail's the word. 'It was me!' 'Eh?' 'That thing Mrs Travers just read. You remember you showed me the proof at lunch that day and told me to drop it off at the office, as you had to rush along to keep a golf date. I read it again after you'd gone, and saw you had left out that bit about the sausages - accidentally, I thought - and it seemed to me so frightfully funny and clever that... Well, I put it in at the end. I felt it just rounded the thing off.' 14 There was silence for some moments, broken only by the sound of an aunt saying 'Lord love a duck!' Kipper stood blinking, as I had sometimes seen him do at the boxing tourneys in which he indulged when in receipt of a shrewd buffet on some tender spot like the tip of the nose. Whether or not the idea of taking Bobbie's neck in both hands and twisting it into a spiral floated through his mind, I cannot say, but if so it was merely the ideal dream of a couple of seconds or so, for almost immediately love prevailed. She had described him as a lamb, and it was with all the mildness for which lambs are noted that he now spoke. 'Oh, I see. So that's how it was.' 'I'm so sorry.' 'Don't mention it.' 'Can you ever forgive me?' 'Oh, rather.' 'I meant so well.' 'Of course you did.' 'Will you really get into trouble about this?' 'There may be some slight unpleasantness.' 'Oh, Reggie!' 'Quite all right.' 'I've ruined your life.' 'Nonsense. The Thursday Review isn't the only paper in London. If they fire me, I'll accept employment elsewhere.' This scarcely squared with what he had told me about being blacklisted, but I forbore to mention this, for I saw that his words had cheered Bobbie up considerably, and I didn't want to bung a spanner into her mood of bien etre. Never does to dash the cup of happiness from a girl's lips when after plumbing the depths she has started to take a swig at it. 'Of course!' she said. 'Any paper would be glad to have a valuable man like you.' 'They'll fight like tigers for his services,' I said, helping things along. 'You don't find a chap like Kipper out of circulation for more than a day or so.' 'You're so clever.' 'Oh, thanks.' 'I don't mean you, ass, I mean Reggie.' 'Ah, yes. Kipper has what it takes, all right.' 'All the same,' said Aunt Dahlia, 'I think, when Upjohn arrives, you had better do all you can to ingratiate yourself with him.' I got her meaning. She was recommending that grappling-to-the-soul- with-hoops-of-steel stuff. 'Yes,' I said. 'Exert the charm, Kipper, and there's a chance he might call the thing off.' 'Bound to,' said Bobbie. 'Nobody can resist you, darling.' 'Do you think so, darling?' 'Of course I do, darling.' 'Well, let's hope you're right, darling. In the meantime,' said Kipper, 'if I don't get that whisky-and-soda soon, I shall disintegrate. Would you mind if I went in search of it, Mrs Travers?' 'It's the very thing I was about to suggest myself. Dash along and drink your fill, my unhappy young stag at eve.' 'I'm feeling rather like a restorative, too,' said Bobbie. 'Me also,' I said, swept along on the tide of the popular movement. 'Though I would advise,' I said, when we were outside, 'making it port. More authority. We'll look in on Swordfish. He will provide.' We found Pop Glossop in his pantry polishing silver, and put in our order. He seemed a little surprised at the inrush of such a multitude, but on learning that our tongues were hanging out obliged with a bottle of the best, and after we had done a bit of tissue-restoring, Kipper, who had preserved a brooding silence since entering, rose and left us, saying that if we didn't mind he would like to muse apart for a while. I saw Pop Glossop give him a sharp look as he went out and knew that Kipper's demeanour had roused his professional interest, causing him to scent in the young visitor a potential customer. These brain specialists are always on the job and never miss a trick. Tactfully waiting till the door had closed, he said: 'Is Mr Herring an old friend of yours, Mr Wooster?' 'Bertie.' 'I beg your pardon. Bertie. You have known him for some time?' 'Practically from the egg.' 'And is Miss Wickham a friend of his?' 'Reggie Herring and I are engaged, Sir Roderick,' said Bobbie. Her words seemed to seal the Glossop lips. He said 'Oh' and began to talk about the weather and continued to do so until Bobbie, who since Kipper's departure had been exhibiting signs of restlessness, said she thought she would go and see how he was making out. Finding himself de- Wickham-ed, he unsealed his lips without delay. 'I did not like to mention it before Miss Wickham, as she and Mr Herring are engaged, for one is always loath to occasion anxiety, but that young man has a neurosis.' 'He isn't always as dippy as he looked just now.' 'Nevertheless-' 'And let me tell you something, Roddy. If you were as up against it as he is, you'd have a neurosis, too.' And feeling that it would do no harm to get his views on the Kipper situation, I unfolded the tale. 'So you see the posish,' I concluded. 'The only way he can avoid the fate that is worse than death - viz. Letting his employers get nicked for a sum beyond the dreams of avarice - is by ingratiating himself with Upjohn, which would seem to any thinking man a shot that's not on the board. I mean, he had four years with him at Malvern House and didn't ingratiate himself once, so it's difficult to see how he's going to start doing it now. It seems to me the thing's an impasse. French expression,' I explained, 'meaning that we're stymied good and proper with no hope of finding a formula.' To my surprise, instead of clicking the tongue and waggling the head gravely to indicate that he saw the stickiness of the dilemma, he chuckled fatly, as if having spotted an amusing side to the thing which had escaped me. Having done this, he blessed his soul, which was his way of saying 'Gorblimey'. 'It really is quite extraordinary, my dear Bertie,' he said, 'how associating with you restores my youth. Your lightest word seems to bring back old memories. I find myself recollecting episodes in the distant past which I have not thought of for years and years. It is as though you waved a magic wand of some kind. This matter of the problem confronting your friend Mr Herring is a case in point. While you were telling me of his troubles, the mists shredded away, the hands of the clock turned back, and I was once again a young fellow in my early twenties, deeply involved in the strange affair of Bertha Simmons, George Lanchester and Bertha's father, old Mr Simmons, who at that time resided in Putney. He was in the imported lard and butter business.' 'The - what was that strange affair again?' He repeated the cast of characters, asked me if I would care for another drop of port, a suggestion with which I readily fell in, and proceeded. 'George, a young man of volcanic passions, met Bertha Simmons at a dance at Putney Town Hall in aid of the widows of deceased railway porters and became instantly enamoured. And his love was returned. When he encountered Bertha next day in Putney High Street and, taking her off to a confectioner's for an ice cream, offered her with it his hand and heart, she accepted them enthusiastically. She said that when they were dancing together on the previous night something had seemed to go all over her, and he said he had had exactly the same experience.' 'Twin souls, what?' 'A most accurate description.' 'In fact, so far, so good.' 'Precisely. But there was an obstacle, and a very serious one. George was a swimming instructor at the local baths, and Mr Simmons had higher views for his daughter. He forbade the marriage. I am speaking, of course, of the days when fathers did forbid marriage. It was only when George saved him from drowning that he relented and gave the young couple his consent and blessing.' 'How did that happen?' 'Perfectly simple. I took Mr Simmons for a stroll on the river bank and pushed him in, and George, who was waiting in readiness, dived into the water and pulled him out. Naturally I had to undergo a certain amount of criticism of my clumsiness, and it was many weeks before I received another invitation to Sunday supper at Chatsworth, the Simmons residence, quite a privation in those days when I was a penniless medical student and perpetually hungry, but I was glad to sacrifice myself to help a friend and the results, as far as George was concerned, were of the happiest. And what crossed my mind, as you were telling me of Mr Herring's desire to ingratiate himself with Mr Upjohn, was that a similar -is "set-up" the term you young fellows use? - would answer in his case. All the facilities are here at Brinkley Court. In my rambles about the grounds I have noticed a small but quite adequate lake, and ... well, there you have it, my dear Bertie. I throw it out, of course, merely as a suggestion.' His words left me all of a glow. When I thought how I had misjudged him in the days when our relations had been distant, I burned with shame and remorse. It seemed incredible that I could ever have looked on this admirable loony-doctor as the menace in the treatment. What a lesson, I felt, this should teach all of us that a man may have a bald head and bushy eyebrows and still remain at heart a jovial sportsman and one of the boys. There was about an inch of the ruby juice nestling in my glass, and as he finished speaking I raised the beaker in a reverent toast. I told him he had hit the bull's eye and was entitled to a cigar or coconut according to choice. 'I'll go and take the matter up with my principals immediately.' 'Can Mr Herring swim?' 'Like several fishes.' 'Then I see no obstacle in the path.' We parted with mutual expressions of good will, and it was only after I had emerged into the summer air that I remembered I hadn't told him that Wilbert had purchased, not pinched, the cow-creamer, and for a moment I thought of going back to apprise him. But I thought again, and didn't. First things first, I said to myself, and the item at the top of the agenda paper was the bringing of a new sparkle to Kipper's eyes. Later on, I told myself, would do, and carried on to where he and Bobbie were pacing the lawn with bowed heads. It would not be long, I anticipated, before I would be bringing those heads up with a jerk. Nor was I in error. Their enthusiasm was unstinted. Both agreed unreservedly that if Upjohn had the merest spark of human feeling in him, which of course had still to be proved, the thing was in the bag. 'But you never thought this up yourself, Bertie,' said Bobbie, always inclined to underestimate the Wooster shrewdness. 'You've been talking to Jeeves.' 'No, as a matter of fact, it was Swordfish who had the idea.' Kipper seemed surprised. 'You mean you told him about it?' 'I thought it the strategic move. Four heads are better than three.' 'And he advised shoving Upjohn into the lake?' 'That's right.' 'Rather a peculiar butler.' I turned this over in my mind. 'Peculiar? Oh, I don't know. Fairly run-of-the-mill I should call him. Yes, more or less the usual type,' I said. 15 With self all eagerness and enthusiasm for the work in hand, straining at the leash, as you might say, and full of the will to win, it came as a bit of a damper when I found on the following afternoon that Jeeves didn't think highly of Operation Upjohn. I told him about it just before starting out for the tryst, feeling that it would be helpful to have his moral support, and was stunned to see that his manner was austere and even puff-faced. He was giving me a description at the time of how it felt to act as judge at a seaside bathing belles contest, and it was with regret that I was compelled to break into this, for he had been holding me spellbound. 'I'm sorry, Jeeves,' I said, consulting my watch, 'but I shall have to be dashing off. Urgent appointment. You must tell me the rest later.' 'At any time that suits you, sir.' 'Are you doing anything for the next half-hour or so?' 'No, sir.' 'Not planning to curl up in some shady nook with a cigarette and Spinoza?' 'No, sir.' 'Then I strongly advise you to come down to the lake and witness a human drama.' And in a few brief words I outlined the programme and the events which had led up to it. He listened attentively and raised his left eyebrow a fraction of an inch. 'Was this Miss Wickham's idea, sir?' 'No. I agree that it sounds like one of hers, but actually it was Sir Roderick Glossop who suggested it. By the way, you were probably surprised to find him buttling here.' 'It did occasion me a momentary astonishment, but Sir Roderick explained the circumstances.' 'Fearing that if he didn't let you in on it, you might unmask him in front of Mrs Cream?' 'No doubt, sir. He would naturally wish to take all precautions. I gathered from his remarks that he has not yet reached a definite conclusion regarding the mental condition of Mr Cream.' 'No, he's still observing. Well, as I say, it was from his fertile bean that the idea sprang. What do you think of it?' 'Ill-advised, sir, in my opinion.' I was amazed. I could hardly b. my e. 'Ill-advised?' 'Yes, sir.' 'But it worked without a hitch in the case of Bertha Simmons, George Lanchester and old Mr Simmons.' 'Very possibly, sir.' Then why this defeatist attitude?' 'It is merely a feeling, sir, due probably to my preference for finesse. I mistrust these elaborate schemes. One cannot depend on them. As the poet Burns says, the best laid plans of mice and men gang aft agley.' 'Scotch, isn't it, that word?' 'Yes, sir.' 'I thought as much. The "gang" told the story. Why do Scotsmen say gang?' 'I have no information, sir. They have not confided in me.' I was getting a bit peeved by now, not at all liking the sniffiness of his manner. I had expected him to speed me on my way with words of encouragement and.uplift, not to go trying to blunt the keen edge of my zest like this. I was rather in the position of a child who runs to his mother hoping for approval and endorsement of something he's done, and is awarded instead a brusque kick in the pants. It was with a good deal of warmth that I came back at him. 'So you think the poet Burns would look askance at this enterprise of ours, do you? Well, you can tell him from me he's an ass. We've thought the thing out to the last detail. Miss Wickham asks Mr Upjohn to come for a stroll with her. She leads him to the lake. I am standing on the brink, ostensibly taking a look at the fishes playing amongst the reeds. Kipper, ready to the last button, is behind a neighbouring tree. On the cue "Oh, look!" from Miss Wickham, accompanied by business of pointing with girlish excitement at something in the water, Upjohn bends over to peer. I push, Kipper dives in, and there we are. Nothing can possibly go wrong.' 'Just as you say, sir. But I still have that feeling.' The blood of the Woosters is hot, and I was about to tell him in set terms what I thought of his bally feeling, when I suddenly spotted what it was that was making him crab the act. The green-eyed monster had bitten him. He was miffed because he wasn't the brains behind this binge, the blue prints for it having been laid down by a rival. Even great men have their weaknesses. So I held back the acid crack I might have made, and went off with a mere 'Oh, yeah?' No sense in twisting the knife in the wound, I mean. All the same, I remained a bit hot under the collar, because when you're all strung up and tense and all that, the last thing you want is people upsetting you by bringing in the poet Burns. I hadn't told him, but our plans had already nearly been wrecked at the outset by the unfortunate circumstance of Upjohn, while in the metropolis, having shaved his moustache, this causing Kipper to come within a toucher of losing his nerve and calling the whole thing off. The sight of that bare expanse or steppe of flesh beneath the nose, he said, did something to him, bringing back the days when he had so often found his blood turning to ice on beholding it. It had required quite a series of pep talks to revive his manly spirits. However, there was good stuff in the lad, and though for a while the temperature of his feet had dropped sharply, threatening to reduce him to the status of a non-co-operative cat in an adage, at 3.30 Greenwich Mean Time he was at his post behind the selected tree, resolved to do his bit. He poked his head round the tree as I arrived, and when I waved a cheery hand at him, waved a fairly cheery hand at me. Though I only caught a glimpse of him, I could see that his upper lip was stiff. There being no signs as yet of the female star and her companion, I deduced that I was a bit on the early side. I lit a cigarette and stood awaiting their entrance, and was pleased to note that conditions could scarcely have been better for the coming water fete. Too often on an English summer day you find the sun going behind the clouds and a nippy wind springing up from the north-east, but this afternoon was one of those still, sultry afternoons when the slightest movement brings the persp. in beads to the brow, an afternoon, in short, when it would be a positive pleasure to be shoved into a lake. 'Most refreshing,' Upjohn would say to himself as the cool water played about his limbs. I was standing there running over the stage directions in my mind to see that I had got them all clear, when I beheld Wilbert Cream approaching, the dog Poppet curvetting about his ankles. On seeing me, the hound rushed forward with uncouth cries as was his wont, but on heaving alongside and getting a whiff of Wooster Number Five calmed down, and I was at liberty to attend to Wilbert, who I could see desired speech with me. He was looking, I noticed, fairly green about the gills, and he conveyed the same suggestion of having just swallowed a bad oyster which I had observed in Kipper on his arrival at Brinkley. It was plain that the loss of Phyllis Mills, goofy though she unquestionably was, had hit him a shrewd wallop, and I presumed that he was coming to me for sympathy and heart balm, which I would have been only too pleased to dish out. I hoped, of course, that he would make it crisp and remove himself at an early date, for when the moment came for the balloon to go up I didn't want to be hampered by an audience. When you're pushing someone into a lake, nothing embarrasses you more than having the front seats filled up with goggling spectators. It was not, however, on the subject of Phyllis that he proceeded to touch. 'Oh, Wooster,' he said, 'I was talking to my mother a night or two ago.' 'Oh, yes?' I said, with a slight wave of the hand intended to indicate that if he liked to talk to his mother anywhere, all over the house, he had my approval. 'She tells me you are interested in mice.' I didn't like the trend the conversation was taking, but I preserved my aplomb. 'Why, yes, fairly interested.' 'She says she found you trying to catch one in my bedroom!' 'Yes, that's right.' 'Good of you to bother.' 'Not at all. Always a pleasure.' 'She says you seemed to be making a very thorough search of my room.' 'Oh, well, you know, when one sets one's hand to the plough.' 'You didn't find a mouse?' 'No, no mouse. Sorry.' 'I wonder if by any chance you happened to find an eighteenth- century cow-creamer?' 'Eh?' 'A silver jug shaped like a cow.' 'No. Why, was it on the floor somewhere?' 'It was in a drawer of the bureau.' 'Ah, then I would have missed it.' 'You'd certainly miss it now. It's gone.' 'Gone?' 'Gone.' 'You mean disappeared, as it were?' 'I do.' 'Strange.' 'Very strange.' 'Yes, does seem extremely strange, doesn't it?' I had spoken with all the old Wooster coolness, and I doubt if a casual observer would have detected that Bertram was not at his ease, but I can assure my public that he wasn't by a wide margin. My heart had leaped in the manner popularized by Kipper Herring and Scarface McColl, crashing against my front teeth with a thud which must have been audible in Market Snodsbury. A far less astute man would have been able to divine what had happened. Not knowing the score owing to having missed the latest stop-press news and looking on the cow-creamer purely in the light of a bit of the swag collected by Wilbert in the course of his larcenous career, Pop Glossop, all zeal, had embarked on the search he had planned to make, and intuition, developed by years of hunt-the- slipper, had led him to the right spot. Too late I regretted sorely that, concentrating so tensely on Operation Upjohn, I had failed to place the facts before him. Had he but known, about summed it up. 'I was going to ask you,' said Wilbert, 'if you think I should inform Mrs Travers.' The cigarette I was smoking was fortunately one of the kind that make you nonchalant, so it was nonchalantly - or fairly nonchalantly - that I was able to reply. 'Oh, I wouldn't do that.' 'Why not?' 'Might upset her.' 'You consider her a sensitive plant?' 'Oh, very. Rugged exterior, of course, but you can't go by that. No, I'd just wait a while, if I were you. I expect it'll turn out that the thing's somewhere you put it but didn't think you'd put it. I mean, you often put a thing somewhere and think you've put it somewhere else and then find you didn't put it somewhere else but somewhere. I don't know if you follow me?' 'I don't.' 'What I mean is, just stick around and you'll probably find the thing.' 'You think it will return?' 'I do.' 'Like a homing pigeon?' 'That's the idea.' 'Oh?' said Wilbert, and turned away to greet Bobbie and Upjohn, who had just arrived on the boat-house landing stage. I had found his manner a little peculiar, particularly that last 'Oh?' but I was glad that there was no lurking suspicion in his mind that I had taken the bally thing. He might so easily have got the idea that Uncle Tom, regretting having parted with his ewe lamb, had employed me to recover it privily, this being the sort of thing, I believe, that collectors frequently do. Nevertheless, I was still much shaken, and I made a mental note to tell Roddy Glossop to slip it back among his effects at the earliest possible moment. I shifted over to where Bobbie and Upjohn were standing, and though up and doing with a heart for any fate couldn't help getting that feeling you get at times like this of having swallowed a double portion of butterflies. My emotions were somewhat similar to those I had experienced when I first sang the Yeoman's Wedding Song. In public, I mean, for of course I had long been singing it in my bath. 'Hullo, Bobbie,' I said. 'Hullo, Bertie,' she said. 'Hullo, Upjohn,' I said. The correct response to this would have been 'Hullo, Wooster', but he blew up in his lines and merely made a noise like a wolf with its big toe caught in a trap. Seemed a bit restive, I thought, as if wishing he were elsewhere. Bobbie was all girlish animation. 'I've been telling Mr Upjohn about that big fish we saw in the lake yesterday, Bertie.' 'Ah yes, the big fish.' 'It was a whopper, wasn't it?' 'Very well-developed.' 'I brought him down here to show it to him.' 'Quite right. You'll enjoy the big fish, Upjohn.' I had been perfectly correct in supposing him to be restive. He did his wolf impersonation once more. 'I shall do nothing of the sort,' he said, and you couldn't find a better word than 'testily' to describe the way he spoke. 'It is most inconvenient for me to be away from the house at this time. I am expecting a telephone call from my lawyer.' 'Oh, I wouldn't bother about telephone calls from lawyers,' said heartily. 'These legal birds never say anything worth listening to. Just gab gab gab. You'll never forgive yourself if you miss the big fish. You were saying, Upjohn?' I broke off courteously, for he had spoken. 'I am saying, Mr Wooster, that both you and Miss Wickham are labouring under a singular delusion in supposing that I am interested in fish, whether large or small. I ought never to have left the house. I shall return there at once.' 'Oh, don't go yet,' said. 'Wait for the big fish,' said Bobbie. 'Bound to be along shortly,' I said. 'At any moment now,' said Bobbie. Her eyes met mine, and I read in them the message she was trying to convey - viz. that the time had come to act. There is a tide in the affairs of men which taken at the flood leads on to fortune. Not my own. Jeeves's. She bent over and pointed with an eager finger. 'Oh, look!' she cried. This, as I had explained to Jeeves, should have been the cue for Upjohn to bend over, too, thus making it a simple task for me to do my stuff, but he didn't bend over an inch. And why? Because at this moment the goof Phyllis, suddenly appearing in our midst, said: 'Daddy, dear, you're wanted on the telephone.' Upon which, standing not on the order of his going, Upjohn was off as if propelled from a gun. He couldn't have moved quicker if he had been the dachshund Poppet, who at this juncture was running round in circles, trying, if I read his thoughts aright, to work off the rather heavy lunch he had had earlier in the afternoon. One began to see what the poet Burns had meant. I don't know anything that more promptly gums up a dramatic sequence than the sudden and unexpected exit of an important member of the cast at a critical point in the proceedings. I was reminded of the time when we did Charley's Aunt at the Market Snodsbury Town Hall in aid of the local church organ fund and half-way through the second act, just when we were all giving of our best, Catsmeat Potter-Pirbright, who was playing Lord Fancourt Babberley, left the stage abruptly to attend to an unforeseen nose bleed. As far as Bobbie and I were concerned, silence reigned, this novel twist in the scenario having wiped speech from our lips, as the expression is, but Phyllis continued vocal. 'I found this darling pussycat in the garden,' she said, and for the first time I observed that she was bearing Augustus in her arms. He was looking a bit disgruntled, and one could readily see why. He wanted to catch up with his sleep and was being kept awake by the endearments she was murmuring in his ear. She lowered him to the ground. 'I brought him here to talk to Poppet. Poppet loves cats, don't you angel? Come and say how-d'you-do to the sweet pussykins, darling.' I shot a quick look at Wilbert Cream, to see how he was reacting to this. It was the sort of observation which might well have quenched the spark of love in his bosom, for nothing tends to cool the human heart more swiftly than babytalk. But so far from being revolted he was gazing yearningly at her as if her words were music to his ears. Very odd, I felt, and I was just saying to myself that you never could tell, when I became aware of a certain liveliness in my immediate vicinity. At the moment when Augustus touched ground and curling himself into a ball fell into a light doze, Poppet had completed his tenth lap and was preparing to start on his eleventh. Seeing Augustus, he halted in mid-stride, smiled broadly, turned his ears inside out, stuck his tail straight up at right angles to the parent body and bounded forward, barking merrily. I could have told the silly ass his attitude was all wrong. Roused abruptly from slumber, the most easy-going cat is apt to wake up cross. Already Augustus had had much to endure from Phyllis, who had doubtless jerked him out of dreamland when scooping him up in the garden, and all this noise and heartiness breaking out just as he dropped off again put the lid on his sullen mood. He spat peevishly, there was a sharp yelp, and something long and brown came shooting between my legs, precipitating itself and me into the depths. The waters closed about me, and for an instant I knew no more. When I rose to the surface, I found that Poppet and I were not the only bathers. We had been joined by Wilbert Cream, who had dived in, seized the hound by the scruff of the neck, and was towing him at a brisk pace to the shore. And by one of those odd coincidences I was at this moment seized by the scruff of the neck myself. 'It's all right, Mr Upjohn, keep quite cool, keep quite ... What the hell are you doing here, Bertie?' said Kipper, for it was he. I may have been wrong, but it seemed to me that he spoke petulantly. I expelled a pint or so of H2O. 'You may well ask,' I said, moodily detaching a water beetle from my hair. 'I don't know if you know the meaning of the word "agley", Kipper, but that, to put it in a nutshell, is the way things have ganged.' 16 Reaching the mainland some moments later and squelching back to the house, accompanied by Bobbie, like a couple of Napoleons squelching back from Moscow, we encountered Aunt Dahlia, who, wearing that hat of hers that looks like one of those baskets you carry fish in, was messing about in the herbaceous border by the tennis lawn. She gaped at us dumbly for perhaps five seconds, then uttered an ejaculation, far from suitable to mixed company, which she had no doubt picked up from fellow-Nimrods in her hunting days. Having got this off the chest, she said: 'What's been going on in this joint? Wilbert Cream came by here just now, soaked to the eyebrows, and now you two appear, leaking at every seam. Have you all been playing water polo with your clothes on?' 'Not so much water polo, more that seaside bathing belles stuff,' I said. 'But it's a long story, and one feels that the cagey thing for Kipper and me to do now is to nip along and get into some dry things, not to linger conferring with you, much,' I added courteously, 'as we always enjoy your conversation.' 'The extraordinary thing is that I saw Upjohn not long ago, and he was as dry as a bone. How was that? Couldn't you get him to play with you?' 'He had to go and talk to his lawyer on the phone,' I said, and leaving Bobbie to place the facts before her, we resumed our squelching. And I was in my room, having shed the moistened outer crust and substituted something a bit more sec in pale flannel, when there was a knock on the door. I flung wide the gates and found Bobbie and Kipper on the threshold. The first thing I noticed about their demeanour was the strange absence of gloom, despondency and what not. I mean, considering that it was little more than a quarter of an hour since all our hopes and dreams had taken the knock, one would have expected their hearts to be bowed down with weight of woe, but their whole aspect was one of buck and optimism. It occurred to me as a possible solution that with that bulldog spirit of never admitting defeat which has made Englishmen - and, of course, Englishwomen - what they are they had decided to have another go along the same lines at some future date, and I asked if this was the case. The answer was in the negative. Kipper said No, there was no likelihood of getting Upjohn down to the lake again, and Bobbie said that even if they did, it wouldn't be any good, because I would be sure to mess things up once more. This stung me, I confess. 'How do you mean, mess things up?' 'You'd be bound to trip over your flat feet and fall in, as you did today.' 'Pardon me,' I said, preserving with an effort the polished suavity demanded from an English gentleman when chewing the rag with one of the other sex, 'you're talking through the back of your fatheaded little neck. I did not trip over my flat feet. I was hurled into the depths by an Act of God, to wit, a totally unexpected dachshund getting between my legs. If you're going to blame anyone blame the goof Phyllis for bringing Augustus there and calling him in his hearing a sweet pussykins. Naturally it made him sore and disinclined to stand any lip from barking dogs.' 'Yes,' said Kipper, always the staunch pal. 'It wasn't Bertie's fault, angel. Say what you will of dachshunds, their peculiar shape makes them the easiest breed of dog to trip over in existence. I feel that Bertie emerges without a stain on his character.' 'I don't,' said Bobbie. 'Still, it doesn't matter.' 'No, it doesn't really matter,' said Kipper, 'because your aunt has suggested a scheme that's just as good as the Lanchester-Simmons thing, if not better. She was telling Bobbie about the time when Boko Fittleworth was trying to ingratiate himself with your Uncle Percy, and you very sportingly offered to go and call your Uncle Percy a lot of offensive names, so that Boko, hovering outside the door, could come in and stick up for him, thus putting himself in solid with him. You probably remember the incident?' I quivered. I remembered the incident all right. 'She thinks the same treatment would work with Upjohn, and I'm sure she's right. You know how you feel when you suddenly discover you've a real friend, a fellow who thinks you're terrific and won't hear a word said against you. It touches you. If you had anything in the nature of a prejudice against the chap, you change your opinion of him. You feel you can't do anything to injure such a sterling bloke. And that's how Upjohn is going to feel about me, Bertie, when I come in and lend him my sympathy and support as you stand there calling him all the names you can think of. You must have picked up dozens from your aunt. She used to hunt, and if you hunt, you have to know all the names there are because people are always riding over hounds and all that. Ask her to jot down a few of the best on a half-sheet of notepaper.' 'He won't need that,' said Bobbie. 'He's probably got them all tucked away in his mind.' 'Of course. Learned them at her knee as a child. Well, that's the set-up, Bertie. You wait your opportunity and corner Upjohn somewhere and tower over him-' 'As he crouches in his chair.' ' - and shake your finger in his face and abuse him roundly. And when he's quailing beneath your scorn and wishing some friend in need would intervene and save him from this terrible ordeal, I come in, having heard all. Bobbie suggests that I knock you down, but I don't think I could do that. The recollection of our ancient friendship would make me pull my punch. I shall simply rebuke you. "Wooster," I shall say, "I am shocked. Shocked and astounded. I cannot understand how you can talk like that to a man I have always respected and looked up to, a man in whose preparatory school I spent the happiest years of my life. You strangely forget yourself, Wooster." Upon which, you slink out, ba