Just Enough Jeeves

Just Enough Jeeves

A
fter the thing was all over, when peril had ceased to loom and happy endings had been distributed in heaping handfuls and we were driving home with our hats on the side of our heads, having shaken the dust of Steeple Bumpleigh from our tyres, I confessed to Jeeves that there had been moments during the recent proceedings when Bertram Wooster, though no weakling, had come very near to despair.
 ‘Within a toucher, Jeeves.’
 ‘Unquestionably affairs had developed a certain menacing trend, sir.’
 ‘I saw no ray of hope. It looked to me as if the blue bird had thrown in the towel and formally ceased to function. And yet here we are, all boomps-a-daisy. Makes one think a bit, that.’
 ‘Yes, sir.’
 ‘There’s an expression on the tip of my tongue which seems to me to sum the whole thing up. Or, rather, when I say an expression, I mean a saying. A wheeze. A gag. What, I believe, is called a saw. Something about Joy doing something.’
 ‘Joy cometh in the morning, sir?’
 ‘That’s the baby. Not one of your things, is it?’
 ‘No, sir.’
 ‘Well, it’s dashed good,’ I said.
 And I still think that there can be no neater way of putting in a nutshell the outcome of the super-sticky affair of Nobby Hopwood, Stilton Cheese-wright, Florence Craye, my Uncle Percy, J. Chichester Clam, Edwin the Boy Scout and old Boko Fittleworth —or, as my biographers will probably call it, the Steeple Bumpleigh Horror.

E
ven before the events occurred which I am about to relate, the above hamlet had come high up on my list of places to be steered sedulously clear of. I don’t know if you have ever seen one of those old maps where they mark a spot with a cross and put ‘Here be dragons’ or ‘Keep ye eye skinned for hippogriffs’, but I had always felt that some such kindly warning might well have been given to pedestrians and traffic with regard to this Steeple Bumpleigh.
 A picturesque settlement, yes. None more so in all Hampshire. It lay embowered, as I believe the expression is, in the midst of smiling fields and leafy woods, hard by a willow-fringed river, and you couldn’t have thrown a brick in it without hitting a honeysuckle-covered cottage or beaning an apple-cheeked villager. But you remember what the fellow said —it’s not a bally bit of use every prospect pleasing if man is vile, and the catch about Steeple Bumpleigh was that it contained Bumpleigh Hall, which in its turn contained my Aunt Agatha and her second husband.

Reprinted from JOY IN THE MORNING from JUST ENOUGH JEEVES by P. G. Wodehouse. Copyright © 1947 by P G. Wodehouse. Copyright renewed 1975 by Lady Ethel Wodehouse.  With permission of the publisher, W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.