Joy in the Morning Read Free Page A

of course, I must autograph it for you,’ she said, and at the same moment all was suddenly made clear to me. I had missed it at first, because I had been concentrating on the girl with the green face, but I now perceived at the bottom of the jacket the words ‘By Florence Craye’. They had been half hidden by a gummed-on label which said ‘Book Society Choice of the Month’. I saw all, and the thought of how near I had come to marrying a female novelist made everything go black for a bit.
    She wrote in the book with a firm hand, thus dishing any prospect that the shop would take it back and putting me seven bob and a tanner down almost, as you might say, before the day had started. Then she said ‘Well!’ still with that turtle dove timbre in her voice.
    ‘Fancy you buying “Spindrift”!’
    Well, one has to say the civil thing, and it may be that in the agitation of the moment I overdid it a bit. I rather think that the impression I must have conveyed, when I assured her that I had made a bee-line for the beastly volume, was that I had been counting the minutes till I could get my hooks on it. At any rate, she came back with a gratified simper.
    ‘I can’t tell you how pleased I am. Not just because it’s mine, but because I see that all the trouble I took training your mind was not wasted. You have grown to love good literature.’
    It was at this point, as if he had entered on cue, that the motheaten bird returned and said they had not got old Pop Spinoza, but could get him for me. He seemed rather depressed about it all, but Florence’s eyes lit up as if somebody had pressed a switch.
    ‘Bertie! This is amazing! Do you really read Spinoza?’
    It’s extraordinary how one yields to that fatal temptation to swank. It undoes the best of us. Nothing, I mean, would have been simpler than to reply that she had got the data twisted and that the authoritatively annotated edition was a present for Jeeves. But, instead of doing the simple, manly, straightforward thing, I had to go and put on dog.
    ‘Oh, rather,’ I said, with an intellectual flick of the umbrella. ‘When I have a leisure moment, you will generally find me curled up with Spinoza’s latest.’
    ‘Well! ’
    A simple word, but as she spoke it a shudder ran through me from brilliantined topknot to rubber shoe sole.
    It was the look that accompanied the yip that caused this shudder. It was exactly the same sort of look that Madeline Bassett had given me, that time I went to Totleigh Towers to pinch old Bassett’s cow-creamer and she thought I had come because I loved her so much that I couldn’t stay away from her side. A frightful, tender, melting look that went through me like a red-hot bradawl through a pat of butter and filled me with a nameless fear.
    I wished now I hadn’t plugged Spinoza so heartily, and above all I wished I hadn’t been caught in the act of apparently buying this blighted ‘Spindrift’. I saw that unwittingly I had been giving myself a terrific build-up, causing this girl to see Bertram Wooster with new eyes and to get hep to his hidden depths. It might quite well happen that she would review the position in the light of this fresh evidence and decide that she had made a mistake in breaking off her engagement to so rare a spirit. And once she got thinking along those lines, who knew what the harvest might be?
    An imperious urge came upon me to be elsewhere, before I could make a chump of myself further.
    ‘Well, I’m afraid I must be popping,’ I said. ‘Most important appointment. Frightfully jolly, seeing you again.’
    ‘We ought to see each other more,’ she replied, still with that melting look. ‘We ought to have some long talks.’
    ‘Oh, rather.’
    ‘A developing mind is so fascinating. Why don’t you ever come to the Hall?’
    ‘Oh, well, one gets a bit chained to the metropolis, you know.’
    ‘I should like to show you the reviews of “Spindrift”. They are wonderful. Edwin is pasting them in