Sir Pelham Grenville Wodehouse, KBE, was a comic writer who enjoyed enormous popular success during a career of more than seventy years and continues to be widely read over 40 years after his death. Despite the political and social upheavals that occurred during his life, much of which was spent in France and the United States, Wodehouse's main canvas remained that of prewar English upper-class society, reflecting his birth, education, and youthful writing career. An acknowledged master of English prose, Wodehouse has been admired both by contemporaries such as Hilaire Belloc, Evelyn Waugh and Rudyard Kipling and by more recent writers such as Douglas Adams, Salman Rushdie and Terry Pratchett. Sean O'Casey famously called him "English literature's performing flea", a description that Wodehouse used as the title of a collection of his letters to a friend, Bill Townend.
Best known today for the Jeeves and Blandings Castle novels and short stories, Wodehouse was also a talented playwright and lyricist who was part author and writer of fifteen plays and of 250 lyrics for some thirty musical comedies. He worked with Cole Porter on the musical Anything Goes (1934) and frequently collaborated with Jerome Kern and Guy Bolton. He wrote the lyrics for the hit song Bill in Kern's Show Boat (1927), wrote the lyrics for the Gershwin/Romberg musical Rosalie (1928), and collaborated with Rudolf Friml on a musical version of The Three Musketeers (1928).

Chapter 1 : Jeeves Takes Charge

Now, touching this business of old Jeeves—my man, you know—how do we stand? Lots of people think I’m much too dependent on him. My Aunt Agatha, in fact, has even gone so far as to call him my keeper. Well, what I say is: Why not? The man’s a genius. From the collar upward he stands alone. I gave up trying to run my own affairs within a week of his coming to me. That was about half a dozen years ago, directly after the rather rummy business of Florence Craye, my Uncle Willoughby’s book, and Edwin, the Boy Scout.

The thing really began when I got back to Easeby, my uncle’s place in Shropshire. I was spending a week or so there, as I generally did in the summer; and I had had to break my visit to come back to London to get a new valet. I had found Meadowes, the fellow I had taken to Easeby with me, sneaking my silk socks, a thing no bloke of spirit could stick at any price. It transpiring, moreover, that he had looted a lot of other things here and there about the place, I was reluctantly compelled to hand the misguided blighter the mitten and go to London to ask the registry office to dig up another specimen for my approval. They sent me Jeeves.

I shall always remember the morning he came. It so happened that the night before I had been present at a rather cheery little supper, and I was feeling pretty rocky. On top of this I was trying to read a book Florence Craye had given me. She had been one of the house-party at Easeby, and two or three days before I left we had got engaged. I was due back at the end of the week, and I knew she would expect me to have finished the book by then. You see, she was particularly keen on boosting me up a bit nearer her own plane of intellect. She was a girl with a wonderful profile, but steeped to the gills in serious purpose. I can’t give you a better idea of the way things stood than by telling you that the book she’d given me to read was called ‘Types of Ethical Theory,’ and that when I opened it at random I struck a page beginning:—

‘The postulate or common understanding involved in speech is certainly co-extensive, in the obligation it carries, with the social organism of which language is the instrument, and the ends of which it is an effort to subserve.’

All perfectly true, no doubt; but not the sort of thing to spring on a lad with a morning head.

I was doing my best to skim through this bright little volume when the bell rang. I crawled off the sofa and opened the door. A kind of darkish sort of respectful Johnnie stood without.

‘I was sent by the agency, sir,’ he said. ‘I was given to understand that you required a valet.’

I’d have preferred an undertaker; but I told him to stagger in, and he floated noiselessly through the doorway like a healing zephyr. That impressed me from the start. Meadowes had had flat feet and used to clump. This fellow didn’t seem to have any feet at all. He just streamed in. He had a grave, sympathetic face, as if he, too, knew what it was to sup with the lads.

‘Excuse me, sir,’ he said gently.

Then he seemed to flicker, and wasn’t there any longer. I heard him moving about in the kitchen, and presently he came back with a glass on a tray.

‘If you would drink this, sir,’ he said, with a kind of bedside manner, rather like the royal doctor shooting the bracer into the sick prince. ‘It is a little preparation of my own invention. It is the Worcester Sauce that gives it its colour. The raw egg makes it nutritious. The red pepper gives it its bite. Gentlemen have told me they have found it extremely invigorating after a late evening.’

I would have clutched at anything that looked like a life-line that morning. I swallowed the stuff. For a moment I felt as if somebody had touched off a bomb inside the old bean and was strolling down my throat with a lighted torch, and then everything seemed suddenly to get all right. The sun shone in through the window; birds twittered in the tree-tops; and, generally speaking, hope dawned once more.

‘You’re engaged!’ I said, as soon as I could say anything.

I perceived clearly that this cove was one of the world’s workers, the sort no home should be without.

‘Thank you, sir. My name is Jeeves.’

‘You can start in at once?’

‘Immediately, sir.’

‘Because I’m due down at Easeby, in Shropshire, the day after to-morrow.’

‘Very good, sir.’ He looked past me at the mantelpiece. ‘That is an excellent likeness of Lady Florence Craye, sir. It is two years since I saw her ladyship. I was at one time in Lord Worplesdon’s employment. I tendered my resignation because I could not see eye to eye with his lordship in his desire to dine in dress trousers, a flannel shirt, and a shooting coat.’

He couldn’t tell me anything I didn’t know about the old boy’s eccentricity. This Lord Worplesdon was Florence’s father. He was the old buster who, a few years later, came down to breakfast one morning, lifted the first cover he saw, said ‘Eggs! Eggs! Eggs! Damn all eggs!’ in an overwrought sort of voice, and instantly legged it for France, never to return to the bosom of his family. This, mind you, being a bit of luck for the bosom of the family, for old Worplesdon had the worst temper in the county.

I had known the family ever since I was a kid, and from boyhood up this old boy had put the fear of death into me. Time, the great healer, could never remove from my memory the occasion when he found me—then a stripling of fifteen—smoking one of his special cigars in the stables. He got after me with a hunting-crop just at the moment when I was beginning to realise that what I wanted most on earth was solitude and repose, and chased me more than a mile across difficult country. If there was a flaw, so to speak, in the pure joy of being engaged to Florence, it was the fact that she rather took after her father, and one was never certain when she might erupt. She had a wonderful profile, though.

‘Lady Florence and I are engaged, Jeeves,’ I said.

‘Indeed, sir?’

You know, there was a kind of rummy something about his manner. Perfectly all right and all that, but not what you’d call chirpy. It somehow gave me the impression that he wasn’t keen on Florence. Well, of course, it wasn’t my business. I supposed that while he had been valeting old Worplesdon she must have trodden on his toes in some way. Florence was a dear girl, and, seen sideways, most awfully good-looking; but if she had a fault it was a tendency to be a bit imperious with the domestic staff.

At this point in the proceedings there was another ring at the front door. Jeeves shimmered out and came back with a telegram. I opened it. It ran:

Return immediately. Extremely urgent. Catch first train. Florence.

‘Rum!’ I said.

‘Sir?’

‘Oh, nothing!’

It shows how little I knew Jeeves in those days that I didn’t go a bit deeper into the matter with him. Nowadays I would never dream of reading a rummy communication without asking him what he thought of it. And this one was devilish odd. What I mean is, Florence knew I was going back to Easeby the day after to-morrow, anyway; so why the hurry call? Something must have happened, of course; but I couldn’t see what on earth it could be.

‘Jeeves,’ I said, ‘we shall be going down to Easeby this afternoon. Can you manage it?’

‘Certainly, sir.’

‘You can get your packing done and all that?’

‘Without any difficulty, sir. Which suit will you wear for the journey?’

‘This one.’

I had on a rather sprightly young check that morning, to which I was a good deal attached; I fancied it, in fact, more than a little. It was perhaps rather sudden till you got used to it, but, nevertheless, an extremely sound effort, which many lads at the club and elsewhere had admired unrestrainedly.

‘Very good, sir.’

Again there was that kind of rummy something in his manner. It was the way he said it, don’t you know. He didn’t like the suit. I pulled myself together to assert myself. Something seemed to tell me that, unless I was jolly careful and nipped this lad in the bud, he would be starting to boss me. He had the aspect of a distinctly resolute blighter.

Well, I wasn’t going to have any of that sort of thing, by Jove! I’d seen so many cases of fellows who had become perfect slaves to their valets. I remember poor old Aubrey Fothergill telling me—with absolute tears in his eyes, poor chap!—one night at the club, that he had been compelled to give up a favourite pair of brown shoes simply because Meekyn, his man, disapproved of them. You have to keep these fellows in their place, don’t you know. You have to work the good old iron-hand-in-the-velvet-glove wheeze. If you give them a what’s-its-name, they take a thingummy.

‘Don’t you like this suit, Jeeves?’ I said coldly.

‘Oh, yes, sir.’

‘Well, what don’t you like about it?’

‘It is a very nice suit, sir.’

‘Well, what’s wrong with it? Out with it, dash it!’

‘If I might make the suggestion, sir, a simple brown or blue, with a hint of some quiet twill—’

‘What absolute rot!’

‘Very good, sir.’

‘Perfectly blithering, my dear man!’

‘As you say, sir.’

I felt as if I had stepped on the place where the last stair ought to have been, but wasn’t. I felt defiant, if you know what I mean, and there didn’t seem anything to defy.

All right, then,’ I said.

‘Yes, sir.’

And then he went away to collect his kit, while I started in again on ‘Types of Ethical Theory’ and took a stab at a chapter headed ‘Idiopsychological Ethics.’

* * *

Most of the way down in the train that afternoon, I was wondering what could be up at the other end. I simply couldn’t see what could have happened. Easeby wasn’t one of those country houses you read about in the society novels, where young girls are lured on to play baccarat and then skinned to the bone of their jewellery, and so on. The house-party I had left had consisted entirely of law-abiding birds like myself.

Besides, my uncle wouldn’t have let anything of that kind go on in his house. He was a rather stiff, precise sort of old boy, who liked a quiet life. He was just finishing a history of the family or something, which he had been working on for the last year, and didn’t stir much from the library. He was rather a good instance of what they say about its being a good scheme for a fellow to sow his wild oats. I’d been told that in his youth Uncle Willoughby had been a bit of a rounder. You would never have thought it to look at him now.

When I got to the house, Oakshott, the butler, told me that Florence was in her room, watching her maid pack. Apparently there was a dance on at a house about twenty miles away that night, and she was motoring over with some of the Easeby lot and would be away some nights. Oakshott said she had told him to tell her the moment I arrived; so I trickled into the smoking-room and waited, and presently in she came. A glance showed me that she was perturbed, and even peeved. Her eyes had a goggly look, and altogether she appeared considerably pipped.

‘Darling!’ I said, and attempted the good old embrace; but she side-stepped like a bantam weight.

‘Don’t!’

‘What’s the matter?’

‘Everything’s the matter! Bertie, you remember asking me, when you left, to make myself pleasant to your uncle?’

‘Yes.’

The idea being, of course, that as at that time I was more or less dependent on Uncle Willoughby I couldn’t very well marry without his approval. And though I knew he wouldn’t have any objection to Florence, having known her father since they were at Oxford together, I hadn’t wanted to take any chances; so I had told her to make an effort to fascinate the old boy.

‘You told me it would please him particularly if I asked him to read me some of his history of the family.’

‘Wasn’t he pleased?’

‘He was delighted. He finished writing the thing yesterday afternoon, and read me nearly all of it last night. I have never had such a shock in my life. The book is an outrage. It is impossible. It is horrible!’

‘But, dash it, the family weren’t so bad as all that.’

‘It is not a history of the family at all. Your uncle has written his reminiscences! He calls them “Recollections of a Long Life”!’

I began to understand. As I say, Uncle Willoughby had been somewhat on the tabasco side as a young man, and it began to look as if he might have turned out something pretty fruity if he had started recollecting his long life.

‘If half of what he has written is true,’ said Florence, ‘your uncle’s youth must have been perfectly appalling. The moment we began to read he plunged straight into a most scandalous story of how he and my father were thrown out of a music-hall in 1887!’

‘Why?’

‘I decline to tell you why.’

It must have been something pretty bad. It took a lot to make them chuck people out of music-halls in 1887.

‘Your uncle specifically states that father had drunk a quart and a half of champagne before beginning the evening,’ she went on. ‘The book is full of stories like that. There is a dreadful one about Lord Emsworth.’

‘Lord Emsworth? Not the one we know? Not the one at Blandings?’

A most respectable old Johnnie, don’t you know. Doesn’t do a thing nowadays but dig in the garden with a spud.

‘The very same. That is what makes the book so unspeakable. It is full of stories about people one knows who are the essence of propriety to-day, but who seem to have behaved, when they were in London in the ‘eighties, in a manner that would not have been tolerated in the fo’c’sle of a whaler. Your uncle seems to remember everything disgraceful that happened to anybody when he was in his early twenties. There is a story about Sir Stanley Gervase-Gervase at Rosherville Gardens which is ghastly in its perfection of detail. It seems that Sir Stanley—but I can’t tell you!’

‘Have a dash!’ ‘No!’

‘Oh, well, I shouldn’t worry. No publisher will print the book if it’s as bad as all that.’

‘On the contrary, your uncle told me that all negotiations are settled with Riggs and Ballinger, and he’s sending off the manuscript to-morrow for immediate publication. They make a special thing of that sort of book. They published Lady Carnaby’s “Memories of Eighty Interesting Years.”’

‘I read ‘em!’

‘Well, then, when I tell you that Lady Carnaby’s Memories are simply not to be compared with your uncle’s Recollections, you will understand my state of mind. And father appears in nearly every story in the book! I am horrified at the things he did when he was a young man!’

‘What’s to be done?’

‘The manuscript must be intercepted before it reaches Riggs and Ballinger, and destroyed!’

I sat up.

This sounded rather sporting.

‘How are you going to do it?’ I inquired.

‘How can I do it? Didn’t I tell you the parcel goes off tomorrow? I am going to the Murgatroyds’ dance to-night and shall not be back till Monday. You must do it. That is why I telegraphed to you.’

‘What!’

She gave me a look.

‘Do you mean to say you refuse to help me, Bertie?’

‘No; but—I say!’

‘It’s quite simple.’

‘But even if I—What I mean is—Of course, anything I can do—but—if you know what I mean—’

‘You say you want to marry me, Bertie?’

‘Yes, of course; but still—’

For a moment she looked exactly like her old father.

‘I will never marry you if those Recollections are published.’

‘But, Florence, old thing!’

‘I mean it. You may look on it as a test, Bertie. If you have the resource and courage to carry this thing through, I will take it as evidence that you are not the vapid and shiftless person most people think you. If you fail, I shall know that your Aunt Agatha was right when she called you a spineless invertebrate and advised me strongly not to marry you. It will be perfectly simple for you to intercept the manuscript, Bertie. It only requires a little resolution.’

‘But suppose Uncle Willoughby catches me at it? He’d cut me off with a bob.’

‘If you care more for your uncle’s money than for me—’

‘No, no! Rather not!’

‘Very well, then. The parcel containing the manuscript will, of course, be placed on the hall table to-morrow for Oakshott to take to the village with the letters. All you have to do is to take it away and destroy it. Then your uncle will think it has been lost in the post.’

It sounded thin to me. ‘Hasn’t he got a copy of it?’

‘No; it has not been typed. He is sending the manuscript just as he wrote it.’

‘But he could write it over again.’

‘As if he would have the energy!’

‘But—’

‘If you are going to do nothing but make absurd objections, Bertie—’

‘I was only pointing things out.’

‘Well, don’t! Once and for all, will you do me this quite simple act of kindness?’

The way she put it gave me an idea.

‘Why not get Edwin to do it? Keep it in the family, kind of, don’t you know. Besides, it would be a boon to the kid.’

A jolly bright idea it seemed to me. Edwin was her young brother, who was spending his holidays at Easeby. He was a ferret-faced kid, whom I had disliked since birth. As a matter of fact, talking of Recollections and Memories, it was young blighted Edwin who, nine years before, had led his father to where I was smoking his cigar and caused all the unpleasantness. He was fourteen now and had just joined the Boy Scouts. He was one of those thorough kids, and took his responsibilities pretty seriously. He was always in a sort of fever because he was dropping behind schedule with his daily acts of kindness. However hard he tried, he’d fall behind; and then you would find him prowling about the house, setting such a clip to try and catch up with himself that Easeby was rapidly becoming a perfect hell for man and beast.

The idea didn’t seem to strike Florence.

‘I shall do nothing of the kind, Bertie. I wonder you can’t appreciate the compliment I am paying you—trusting you like this.’

‘Oh, I see that all right, but what I mean is, Edwin would do it so much better than I would. These Boy Scouts are up to all sorts of dodges. They spoor, don’t you know, and take cover and creep about, and what not.’

‘Bertie, will you or will you not do this perfectly trivial thing for me? If not, say so now, and let us end this farce of pretending that you care a snap of the fingers for me.’

‘Dear old soul, I love you devotedly!’

‘Then will you or will you not—’

‘Oh, all right,’ I said. ‘All right! All right! All right!’

And then I tottered forth to think it over. I met Jeeves in the passage just outside.

‘I beg your pardon, sir. I was endeavouring to find you.’

‘What’s the matter?’

‘I felt that I should tell you, sir, that somebody has been putting black polish on our brown walking shoes.’

‘What! Who? Why?’ ‘I could not say, sir.’

‘Can anything be done with them?’

‘Nothing, sir.’

‘Damn!’

‘Very good, sir.’

* * *

I’ve often wondered since then how these murderer fellows manage to keep in shape while they’re contemplating their next effort. I had a much simpler sort of job on hand, and the thought of it rattled me to such an extent in the night watches that I was a perfect wreck next day. Dark circles under the eyes—I give you my word! I had to call on Jeeves to rally round with one of those life-savers of his.

From breakfast on I felt like a bag-snatcher at a railway station. I had to hang about waiting for the parcel to be put on the hall table, and it wasn’t put. Uncle Willoughby was a fixture in the library, adding the finishing touches to the great work, I supposed, and the more I thought the thing over the less I liked it. The chances against my pulling it off seemed about three to two, and the thought of what would happen if I didn’t gave me cold shivers down the spine. Uncle Willoughby was a pretty mild sort of old boy, as a rule, but I’ve known him to cut up rough, and, by Jove, he was scheduled to extend himself if he caught me trying to get away with his life work.

It wasn’t till nearly four that he toddled out of the library with the parcel under his arm, put it on the table, and toddled off again. I was hiding a bit to the south-east at the moment, behind a suit of armour. I bounded out and legged it for the table. Then I nipped upstairs to hide the swag. I charged in like a mustang and nearly stubbed my toe on young blighted Edwin, the Boy Scout. He was standing at the chest of drawers, confound him, messing about with my ties.

‘Hallo!’ he said.

‘What are you doing here?’

‘I’m tidying your room. It’s my last Saturday’s act of kindness.’

‘Last Saturday’s.’

‘I’m five days behind. I was six till last night, but I polished your shoes.’

‘Was it you—’

‘Yes. Did you see them? I just happened to think of it. I was in here, looking round. Mr. Berkeley had this room while you were away. He left this morning. I thought perhaps he might have left something in it that I could have sent on. I’ve often done acts of kindness that way.’

‘You must be a comfort to one and all!’

It became more and more apparent to me that this infernal kid must somehow be turned out eftsoons or right speedily. I had hidden the parcel behind my back, and I didn’t think he had seen it; but I wanted to get at that chest of drawers quick, before anyone else came along.

‘I shouldn’t bother about tidying the room,’ I said. ‘I like tidying it. It’s not a bit of trouble—really.’

‘But it’s quite tidy now.’

‘Not so tidy as I shall make it.’

This was getting perfectly rotten. I didn’t want to murder the kid, and yet there didn’t seem any other way of shifting him. I pressed down the mental accelerator. The old lemon throbbed fiercely. I got an idea.

‘There’s something much kinder than that which you could do,’ I said. ‘You see that box of cigars? Take it down to the smoking-room and snip off the ends for me. That would save me no end of trouble. Stagger along, laddie.’

He seemed a bit doubtful; but he staggered. I shoved the parcel into a drawer, locked it, trousered the key, and felt better. I might be a chump, but, dash it, I could out-general a mere kid with a face like a ferret. I went downstairs again. Just as I was passing the smoking-room door out curveted Edwin. It seemed to me that if he wanted to do a real act of kindness he would commit suicide.

‘I’m snipping them,’ he said.

‘Snip on! Snip on!’

‘Do you like them snipped much, or only a bit?’

‘Medium.’

‘All right. I’ll be getting on, then.’

‘I should.’

And we parted.