The Jeeves Omnibus - Vol 4: (Jeeves & Wooster): No.4 Read Free

yes,’ I said. ‘The moustache. That is what you are alluding to, is it not? I grew it while you were away. Rather natty, don’t you think?’
    ‘No, sir, I do not.’
    I moistened my lips with the special, still suave to the gills. I felt strong and masterful.
    ‘You dislike the little thing?’
    ‘Yes, sir.’
    ‘You don’t feel it gives me a sort of air? A … how shall I put it? … A kind of diablerie?’
    ‘No, sir.’
    ‘You hurt and disappoint me, Jeeves,’ I said, sipping a couple of sips and getting suaver all the time. ‘I could understand your attitude if the object under advisement were something bushy and waxed at the ends like a sergeant-major’s, but it is merely the delicate wisp of vegetation with which David Niven has for years been winning the applause of millions. When you see David Niven on the screen, you don’t recoil in horror, do you?’
    ‘No, sir. His moustache is very becoming to Mr. Niven.’
    ‘But mine isn’t to me?’
    ‘No, sir.’
    It is at moments like this that a man realizes that the only course for him to pursue, if he is to retain his self-respect, is to unship the velvet hand in the iron glove, or, rather, the other way about. Weakness at such a time is fatal.
    There are limits, I mean to say, and sharply defined limits at that, and these limits I felt that he had passed by about a mile and a quarter. I yield to nobody in my respect for Jeeves’s judgment in the matter of socks, shoes, shirts, hats and cravats, but I was dashed if I was going to have him muscling in and trying to edit the Wooster face. I finished my special and spoke in a quiet, level voice.
    ‘I am sorry, Jeeves. I had hoped for your sympathy and co-operation, but if you are unable to see your way to sympathizing and co-operating, so be it. Come what may, however, I shall maintain the
status quo
. It is
status quos
that people maintain, isn’t it? I have been put to considerable trouble and anxiety growing this moustache, and I do not propose to hew it off just because certain prejudiced parties, whom I will not specify, don’t know a good thing when they see one.
J’y suis, j’y reste
, Jeeves,’ I said, becoming a bit Parisian.
    Well, after this splendid exhibition of resolution on my part I suppose there was nothing much the chap could have said except ‘Very good, sir’ or something of that sort, but, as it happened, he hadn’t time to say even that, for the final word had scarcely left my lips when the front-door bell tootled. He shimmered out, and a moment later shimmered in again.
    ‘Mr. Cheesewright,’ he announced.
    And in clumped the massive form of the bird to whom he alluded. The last person I had expected to see, and, for the matter of that, about the last one I wanted to.

2
    ----
    I DON’T KNOW if you have had the same experience, but I have always found that there are certain blokes whose mere presence tends to make me ill at ease, inducing the nervous laugh, the fiddling with the tie and the embarrassed shuffling of the feet. Sir Roderick Glossop, the eminent loony doctor, until circumstances so arranged themselves that I was enabled to pierce the forbidding exterior and see his better, softer side, was one of these. J. Washburn Stoker, with his habit of kidnapping people on his yacht and throwing his weight about like a pirate of the Spanish Main, was another. And a third is this G. D’Arcy (‘Stilton’) Cheesewright. Catch Bertram Wooster
vis-à-vis
with him, and you do not catch him at his best.
    Considering that he and I have known each other since, as you might say, we were so high, having been at private school, Eton and Oxford together, we ought, I suppose, to be like Damon and what’s-his-name, but we aren’t by any means. I generally refer to him in conversation as ‘that blighter Stilton’, while he, I have been informed by usually reliable sources, makes no secret of his surprise and concern that I am still on the right side of the walls of Colney Hatch