Joy in the Morning by P. G. Wodehouse Page B

play about our cheeks.
    ‘I suppose it never occurred to you to throw water on the flames?’
    ‘It did to Edwin. Only he used paraffin.’
    He started, staring at me incredulously.
    ‘You tried to put the fire out with paraffin? You ought to be certified, and as soon as I can collect a couple of doctors, I’ll have it seen to.’
    What was making this conversation so difficult was, as you have probably spotted, the apparent impossibility of getting the old ass to sort out the principals in the affair and assign to each his respective role. He was one of those men you meet sometimes who only listen to about two words of any observation addressed to them. I suppose he had got that way through presiding at board meetings and constantly chipping in and squelching shareholders in the middle of sentences.
    Once more, I tried to drive it home to him that it was Edwin who had done all the what you might call heavy work, Bertram having been throughout merely an innocent bystander, but it didn’t penetrate. He was left with the settled conviction that I and the child had got together, forming a quorum, and after touching off the place with gunpowder had nursed the conflagration along with careful injections of paraffin, each encouraging each, as you might say, on the principle that it is team-work that tells.
    When he finally pushed off, instructing me to send Jeeves along to him the moment he arrived, he was reiterating the opinion that I ought not to be at large, and wishing – though here I definitely could not see eye to eye with him – that I was ten years younger, so that he could have got after me with that hunting crop of his. He then withdrew, leaving me to my meditations.
    These, as you may suppose, were not of the juiciest. However, they didn’t last long, for I don’t suppose I had been meditating more than about a couple of minutes when a wheezing, rattling sound made itself heard off-stage and there entered left upper centre a vehicle which could only have been a station taxi. There was luggage on it, and looking more closely I saw Jeeves protruding from the side window.
    The weird old object – the cab, I mean, not Jeeves – came to a halt at the gate. Jeeves paid it off, the luggage was dumped by the roadside, and he was at liberty to get into conference with the young master, not an instant too soon for the latter. I had need of his sympathy, encouragement and advice. I also wanted to tick him off a bit for letting me in for all this.

CHAPTER 11
    ‘ J eeves,’ I said, getting right down to it in the old Wooster way, ‘here’s a nice state of things!’
    ‘Sir?’
    ‘Hell’s foundations have been quivering.’
    ‘Indeed, sir?’
    ‘The curse has come upon me. As I warned you it would, if I ever visited Steeple Bumpleigh. You have long been familiar with my views on this leper colony. Have I not repeatedly said that, what though the spicy breezes blow soft o’er Steeple Bumpleigh, the undersigned deemed it wisest to give it the complete miss in baulk?’
    ‘Yes, sir.’
    ‘Very well, Jeeves. Perhaps you will listen to me another time. However, let us flit lightly over the recriminations and confine ourselves to the facts. You notice our little home has been gutted?’
    Yes, sir. I was just observing it.’
    ‘Edwin did that. There’s a lad, Jeeves. There’s a boy who makes you feel that what this country wants is somebody like King Herod. Started in with gunpowder and carried on with paraffin. Just cast your eye over those smouldering ruins. You would scarcely have thought it possible, would you, that one frail child in a sport shirt and khaki shorts could have accomplished such devastation. Yet he did it, Jeeves, and did it on his head. You understand what this means?’
    ‘Yes, sir.’
    ‘He has properly put the kybosh on the trysting-place of Uncle Percy and his nautical pal. You’ll have to think again.’
    ‘Yes, sir. His lordship is fully alive to the fact that in the existing