Jeeves in the Offing

the other end.
‘Mr Wooster?’
‘On the spot.’
‘Good morning, sir. Her ladyship wishes to speak to you. Lady Wickham, sir. Here is Mr Wooster, m’lady.’
And Bobbie’s mother came on the air.
I should have mentioned, by the way, that during the above exchange of ideas with the butler I had been aware of a distant sound of sobbing, like background music, and it now became apparent that it was from the larynx of the relict of the late Sir Cuthbert that it was proceeding. There was a short intermission before she got the vocal cords working, and while I was waiting for her to start the dialogue I found myself wrestling with two problems that presented themselves - the first, What on earth is this woman ringing me up for?, the second, Having got the number, why does she sob?
It was Problem A that puzzled me particularly, for ever since that hot-water-bottle episode my relations with this parent of Bobbie’s had been on the strained side. It was, indeed, an open secret that my standing with her was practically that of a rat of the underworld. I had had this from Bobbie, whose impersonation of her mother discussing me with sympathetic cronies had been exceptionally vivid, and I must confess that I wasn’t altogether surprised. No hostess, I mean to say, extending her hospitality to a friend of her daughter’s, likes to have the young visitor going about the place puncturing people’s water- bottles and leaving at three in the morning without stopping to say good-bye. Yes, I could see her side of the thing all right, and I found it extraordinary that she should be seeking me out on the telephone in this fashion. Feeling as she did so allergic to Bertram, I wouldn’t have thought she’d have phoned me with a ten-foot pole.
However, there beyond a question she was.
‘Mr Wooster?’
‘Oh, hullo, Lady Wickham.’
‘Are you there?’
I put her straight on this point, and she took time out to sob again. She then spoke in a hoarse, throaty voice, like Tallulah Bankhead after swallowing a fish bone the wrong way.
‘Is this awful news true?’
‘Eh?’
‘Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear!’
‘I don’t quite follow.’
‘In this morning’s Times.’
I’m pretty shrewd, and it seemed to me, reading between the lines, that there must have been something in the issue of The Times published that morning that for some reason had upset her, though why she should have chosen me to tell her troubles to was a mystery not easy to fathom. I was about to institute inquiries in the hope of spearing a solution, when in addition to sobbing she started laughing in a hyaena- esque manner, making it clear to my trained ear that she was having hysterics. And before I could speak there was a dull thud suggestive of some solid body falling to earth, I knew not where, and when the dialogue was resumed, I found that the butler had put himself on as an understudy.
‘Mr Wooster?’
‘Still here.’
‘I regret to say that her ladyship has fainted.’
‘It was she I heard going bump?’
‘Precisely, sir. Thank you very much, sir. Good-bye.’
He replaced the receiver and went about his domestic duties, these no doubt including the loosening of the stricken woman’s corsets and burning feathers under her nose, leaving me to chew on the situation without further bulletins from the front.
It seemed to me that the thing to do here was to get hold of The Times and see what it had to offer in the way of enlightenment. It’s a paper I don’t often look at, preferring for breakfast reading the Mirror and the Mail, but Jeeves takes it in and I have occasionally borrowed his copy with a view to having a shot at the crossword puzzle. It struck me as a possibility that he might have left today’s issue in the kitchen, and so it proved. I came back with it, lowered myself into a chair, lit another cigarette and proceeded to cast an eye on its contents.
At a cursory glance what might be called swoon material appeared to be totally absent from its columns. The Duchess of something had been opening a bazaar at Wimbledon in aid of a deserving charity, there was an article on salmon fishing on the Wye, and a Cabinet Minister had made a speech about conditions in the cotton industry, but I could see nothing in these items to induce a loss of consciousness. Nor did it seem probable that a woman would have passed out cold on reading that Herbert Robinson (26) of Grove Road, Ponder’s End, had been jugged for stealing a pair of green and yellow checked