The Jeeves Omnibus by P. G. Wodehouse Page A

into this room at nine o’clock tomorrow morning and finding you in that bed will be enough to start a scandal which will stagger humanity.’
    ‘I mean, he can’t be in the house.’
    ‘Of course he’s in the house.’
    ‘Well, he must be deaf, then. I made enough noise getting in to wake six gentlemen’s gentlemen. Apart from smashing a window at the back –’
    ‘Did you smash a window at the back?’
    ‘I had to, or I couldn’t have got in. It was the window of some sort of bedroom on the ground floor.’
    ‘Why dash it, that’s Brinkley’s bedroom.’
    ‘Well, he wasn’t in it.’
    ‘Why on earth not? I gave him the evening off, not the night.’
    ‘I can see what has happened. He’s away on a toot somewhere, and won’t be back for days. Father had a man who did that once. He went out for his evening from our house on East Sixty-Seventh Street, New York, on April the fourth in a bowler hat, grey gloves and a check suit, and the next we heard of him was a telegram from Portland, Oregon, on April the tenth, saying he had overslept himself and would be back shortly. That’s what your Brinkley must have done.’
    I must say I drew a good deal of comfort from the idea.
    ‘Let us hope so,’ I said. ‘If he is really trying to drown his sorrows, it ought to take him weeks.’
    ‘So, you see, you’ve been making a fuss about nothing. I always say –’
    But what it was she always said, I was not privileged to learn. For at that moment she broke off with a sharp squeak.
    Somebody was knocking on the front door.

8
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Police Persecution
    WE LOOKED AT each other with a wild surmise, silent upon a first-floor back in Chuffnell Regis. That frightful sound, coming unexpectedly like that in the middle of the peaceful summer night, had been enough to strike the chit-chat from anybody’s lips. And what rendered it so particularly unpleasant to us, personally, was the fact that we had both jumped simultaneously to the same ghastly conclusion.
    ‘It’s Father!’ Pauline gargled, and with a swift flip of her finger she doused the candle.
    ‘What did you do that for?’ I said, a good deal pipped. The sudden darkness seemed to make things worse.
    ‘So that he shouldn’t see a light in the window, of course. If he thinks you’re asleep he may go away.’
    ‘What a hope!’ I retorted, as the knocking, which had eased off for a moment, started again with more follow-through than ever.
    ‘Well, I suppose you had better go down,’ said the girl in a subdued sort of voice. ‘Or’ – she seemed to brighten – ‘shall we pour water on him from the staircase window?’
    I started violently. She had made the suggestion as if she considered it one of her best and brightest, and I suddenly realized what it meant to play the host to a girl of her temperament and personality. All that I had ever heard or read about the reckless younger generation seemed to come back to me.
    ‘Don’t dream of it!’ I whispered urgently. ‘Dismiss the project utterly and absolutely from your mind.’
    I mean to say, a dry J. Washburn Stoker seeking an errant daughter was bad enough. A J. Washburn Stoker stimulated to additional acerbity by a jugful of H 2 O on his head, I declined to contemplate. Goodness knows, I wasn’t keen on going down and passing the time of night with the man, but if the alternative was to allow his loved one to drench him to the skin and then wait while he tore the walls down with his bare hands I proposed to do so immediately.
    ‘I’ll have to see him,’ I said.
    ‘Well, be careful.’
    ‘How do you mean, careful?’
    ‘Oh, just careful. Still, of course, he may not have a gun.’
    I swallowed a trifle.
    ‘What exactly would you say the odds were, for and against?’
    She mused awhile.
    ‘I’m trying to remember if Father is a Southerner or not.’
    ‘A what?’
    ‘I know he was born at a place called Carterville, but I can’t recollect if it was Carterville, Kentucky, or Carterville,