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I woke to birdsong and the creep of the sun’s first gentle rays upon my face.
“How lovely,” I expect you expect of me to think, dear reader. “What better way to awaken to a new day than that! You are a lucky fellow indeed, Bertie Wilberforce Wooster!”
Well, I fear I must dash your expectations. For, you see, what I was expecting was not birdsong or sunshine or any other natural phenomena that might move a chap to poetry if he is not very careful; what I expected was, in a word, Jeeves.
(Not that Jeeves is unworthy of literary tribute, or possessed of a less than phenomenal nature, mind. He is, if you’ll allow me the neologism, the phenomenomest that this old world has to offer - particularly so when he appears as if conjured up by magic at my bedside with tea, toast, and eggs and b. just as old Morpheus releases me from his clutches - and while poetry is not one of my many vices, I have certainly written enough of him in prose. He is well-suited for it.
What he was not, however, unlike sunshine and birdsong and all that rot, was there.)
I blinked, and threw the old ocular implements about the room. Jeeves was not concealing himself in a shadowy corner, which he at times attempts to do when we have guests in and feudal propriety demands he become one with the wallpaper. He also did not enter through the door with an apologetic mien and some comment on the End of the World, or some similarly dire circumstance delaying his breakfast preparations somewhat, no matter how long or pleadingly I gazed in that direction. He was not under the bed either, though I will freely admit that my checking there was born more from sheer desperation than any real hope of discovering my trusty valet.
“Jeeves…?” I called. This was not the full-breasted call of the young master beckoning his gentleman’s gentleman to his side - it was a weak warble at best, like one of those avian fellows… ah, Jeeves would know the exact term of the genus… warblers, of course. That’s the ticket.
No Jeeves materialised, for all my warbling. I was beginning to get rather anxious over it. Jeeves was not in the habit of getting sick, as lesser men did, dodging all sniffles and influenzae of the season with customary grace; and even if he did, I trust that he would somehow manage to give a three-days’ notice in advance. Had he perhaps absconded entirely, then? The sea had always had its particular pull on him, and it was not out of the question that this p. p. had finally ripped him from my side and sent him off to shrimp-fish for the rest of his natural life.
(Though I would not begrudge him this development, on the whole. If it is Jeeves’ heart’s true desire to evermore cast his line into the sea, then I wish him and the shrimp all joy of it. Bally waste, and devastating to me personally, but I have always believed that if one is deeply beloved to another, then another must let one go free rather than cage o. in a.’s employ. I had witnessed my dear cousin Angela keep a songbird in her cheerful girlhood, and cared not one bit for it. There was a cruelty to it, caging someone, even if you loved and adored them as dearly as Angela with that bird; and for all that Bertie Wooster is a wastrel of the worst order - and jolly proud of it! - I have never had the sort of temperament that lends itself to cruelty.
Not even in matters of love.)
With visions of Jeeves quietly dying in his sleep of some horrible malady, or alternatively sailing the high seas in a fishing boat (or perchance even both at once) racing through my head at perilous speeds, I peeled the covers off self and slipped into my slippers. Then the morning robe to shield the Wooster corpus from the chill - the Wooster heart remained frosty with fear, but little could be done about that - and I was ready to brave the perhaps-Jeevesless world outside my bedroom.
…not that I braved in the true meaning of the word, exactly. My gait was rather more of a cautious creep, and my ancestors who had so valiantly fought and died at Agincourt would have wept to see it. But I put one pyjama’d pin in front of the other, and it was enough for me to simply be ambulatory, if that is the word I want.
I ambulated. Not a sound stirred in the flat but the shuffling of my slippered feet.
It had been my plan to peek into the kitchen first, in the faint hope that Jeeves might be there, wrestling with my e. and b., hale and hearty and quietly miffed that I was ambulating about the flat in my sleepwear.
This plan was dashed by a discovery I made in the living room. The discovery was Jeeves.
And yet I daresay it took me a moment to accept it as such. Jeeves, the way I know him, and ever expect to see him, is a pillar of fortitude in spotless valeting togs, bulging in all the right places (and especially at the back of the head) and so put-together you could place him on a table and call him a finished jigsaw puzzle.
The man in the living room did not fit this description.
He sat on the settee - sat! That alone is patently unjeevesian! The feudal spirit tends to keep him stiffly upright while in the common areas of the flat, and frankly, I did not think the pelvic bones of the homo jeevesensis would ever consent to bending that way outside of his own bedroom or perhaps the kitchen.
But, well. Setting aside thoughts of Jeeves and his, er, hip area… he sat, as I say, on the settee, with none of his impeccable posture in evidence. His spine was bent, his head lowered, and only kept up by the application of his paws to the face. And this was not the solemn contemplation of Rodin’s Thinker; maybe, if this Rodin chap had gotten roaringly drunk on boat race night and felt the consequences the following morning as he went off to chisel his statue, the end result would have been closer to Jeeves in his current state.
And - here, it was necessary for me to lean briefly against the wall, as shock near as overcame me - Jeeves was underdressed.
Not significantly, mind. More’s the pity. But he was sans jacket (already a rare occurrence outside of his kitchenly domain), sans tie (unheard of), and sans pomade, which gave him an uncommonly ruffled appearance. It was not helped by his waistcoat being only partially buttoned, as far as I could tell from my vantage point, and his shirtsleeves rolled up scandalously high towards the elbow.
It was Jeeves, no doubt. But not a Jeeves I had ever laid eyes on before - indeed, that he would have let me lay eyes on. Jeeves values nothing so much as an orderly appearance, and sniffs at any who do not hold themselves to the same lofty standards as he. Some grave disaster must have occurred - again, I contemplated the E. of the W. - to reduce him to such a state.
“...Jeeves?” I called out once more, with a voice like a yellow-bellied wood warbler alighting gently on a branch. “Is… I say, old thing. Is it all tinkety-tonk with you…?”
Inquiring so, I stopped at a safe distance, and awaited response.
(I am not, generally, in the habit of fearing my valet; not even while adorned in light plum herringbone, which, to Jeeves, has something of the red cloth waved before bovine eyes. Yet I must confess that on that morning, I trembled like the dickens, doyle, and hemingway all taken together. Jeeves sat in the living room with his forearms bared to all the world - Lord only knew what madness might seize him next! I was dealing with a valet in an unstable state of mind, that much was evident, and without the safe d. kept rather firmly between him and self, he might do something that the feudal spirit in him would sorely regret.
As would I regret it, no doubt. I am quite ready to forgive Jeeves all wrongs and missteps, as he so frequently forgives mine - outside of sartorial matters, that is, in which he stands as firm and unshaken as an oak tree chiseled from granite - but if worst came to worst, push to shove, and alarm to the neighbours, Jeeves might be taken from me and carted off to a Glossopian nerve clinic faster than I could say “now wait just a blasted minute!”, and that was obviously not to be desired. I liked Jeeves where he was; even if that was, in order of concern-raisingness, if that is the word I want, in the living room, in his shirtsleeves, and in obvious mental distress.)
I waited. For what, I did not know. For Jeeves to resume the upright posish., cooly inform me that his fit had passed, and shimmer off to the kitchen with a vague air that indicated he wished for me to never speak of it again? For him to leap at me with the glint of madness in his eye, and do to me as Cain did to Abel?
(Or, alternatively, though I was quite ashamed to think it, perhaps more as David did to Jonathan. One picks these things up, you know, if one earns oneself a scripture knowledge prize at school, and recalls them even at the most inappropriate moments, i.e. faced with a distressed valet who quite evidently requires a helpful young master more than… a Jonathan, as it were.)
Perhaps I waited for a pig to sail through the air outside the window. It seemed the sort of day for such things to happen.
At long last, Jeeves raised his noble brow from the equally (if not more so!) noble hands, and regarded me. And with such a look! Reader, it was positively pickwickish.
At this juncture, it becomes necessary for me to tell you of my Dreadful Aunt - beloved, of course, as a good upstanding Wooster loves all his aged relatives, yet Dreadful nonetheless - Agatha’s pekingese dog, Pickwick. I have at length introduced the readers of my publications to McIntosh, her Aberdeen terrier, for all that I might have wished to never have had the occasion (he is a decent enough sort, for a dog, and yet something of the auntliness clings to him), but Pickwick has never featured before, to my recollection.
This may easily be explained by the fact that Pickwick has been dead these fifteen years, God rest his soul. He was my Aunt’s first dog, or rather the first that I myself saw her with in my tender boyhood years, and passed quite peacefully before I grew out of those t. b. y. into my much less tender adulthood. Aunt Agatha bore the loss stoically, though I will swear before any magistrate that, to this day, a tear gathers at the corner of her eye when she passes a pekingese pooch in the street; and she eventually acquired the familiar McIntosh, which has accompanied her since.
Returning, however, to the point, and that prior poodle with the far more appealingly alliterative moniker: by the time he and I were properly introduced, Pickwick's best days were already long behind him, and he knew it. He gazed upon one with a rummy sort of look, the way I imagine the last grizzled survivor of a battalion gazes at the enemy army cresting the nearest ridge. A bone-deep exhaustion, coupled with a resigned hope to have it all over and done with soon. He had been on this earth too many years - and was in fact scheduled to not depart for another good handful after this first encounter with the Wooster person.
We never got on, he and I, and I ascribe that mostly to the fact that I was not the Grim Reaper, come to take him unto his just reward; a failing which he recognised in most people, and generally took quite personally.
It was this characteristic look of Pickwick's, God rest him, that I was reminded of when Jeeves' eyes met mine. There was distinctly something of the world-weary pekingese about him - and I could not for the life of me say why.
“Sir,” he said, and that was all. This assuaged my fears somewhat - the feudal spirit still had its hooks in him, and would hopefully keep him from undue Cain-ing, though also, a little more regrettably, from David-ing - and in the same breath stoked them further.
Moreso than his brevity, it was his tone of voice, you know. Jeeves has a marvellous voice, as he has a marvellous everything, which I have always thought would do well in Parliament, or perhaps even better on the wireless on Christmas Day. Whether he coughs like a fluffy sheep on a gentle meadow, or utters a few well-chosen words that instantly resolve the dilemma du jour, it is a voice that sets one’s heart at ease and which carries the spirit halfway to paradise. ‘Never you fear, Bertie,’ says this voice - or, well, ‘Mr. Wooster,’ if Jeeves’ voice is as proper as the rest of him, as I do not doubt it is - ‘for all shall be well, and all manner of things shall be well, now that Jeeves is here to aid you.’
These comforting and familiar unspoken words were not in his voice that morning, however. Indeed, there were no real words at all; only a silent, desperate scream.
“You’re not quite in the pink, Jeeves,” said I, astutely, yet also hoping to convey in my tone that I would move Heaven and Earth and All That Lay Between to re-pinken him. What y.m. could do more? “Whatever’s the matter with you, dear man!?”
He looked at me with the geriatric pekingese’s quiet deathwish written all over his face, and seemed to weigh his words carefully. He does this sometimes, Jeeves - considers at length how much to tell me of his schemings in whichever recent brouhaha I’d gotten embroiled in, or at least considers how to put it in the sort of simple words that manage to translate a Jeevesian idea to something that is comprehensible to the Wooster thinkbox. I hoped that, in this instance, his hesitance was born from that unbecoming secretive streak, rather than the complexity of the matter; I wished so badly to help, but if there were complex issues at play, I really did not know if I could.
“I am trapped in a time loop, sir,” confessed he, at long last.
“Ah, these things are sent to try us,” said I; already knowing, in my heart, that certain fond daydreams of scooping Jeeves out of the soup for once, which I might have secretly harboured in the very depths of my soul, were rapidly being dashed against the cliffs of complexity, and I would do well to put them out of mind altogether. It would have been too much to hope for, wouldn’t it, that Jeeves might have looked me in the eye and declared that he could not go on another minute without hearing someone play a jolly tune upon the pianoforte? I might’ve managed to aid him there, and aided with such vim and vigour that all would have marvelled to see/hear it. But this, this…
Well, it seemed rather beyond the woosterly ken, what?
Jeeves elaborated, an unsteadiness in his tone that did not suit him, that he had lived this day before. Many times, in fact; and that each was a perfect replica of the one before, barring any intervention he personally undertook. That I was unaware of this was, allegedly, to be expected - Jeeves had found no other man, woman, or child who seemed at all aware of this extraordinary circumstance.
He then directed me to stand by the window, while he remained on the settee, reciting one by one the passersby I would be able to spy on the street below. At my startled cry over his correctness, if that is the word I want, he switched to describing the motorcars that went by the corner, and finally indicated that I ought to turn my gaze upon the roof opposite where, in the next ten seconds, a chimneysweep would near as lose his footing, and only barely manage to catch himself. Here, too, he was entirely correct.
(I would not have needed this demonstration to be convinced. It was a fine parlor trick, but I knew full well that a man of Jeeves’ calibre would have an easy task of pre-arranging things to give the illusion of precognition, if he so desired. Indeed, at times I thought he already possessed such a gift, no time loop-de-looping required, and was merely discreet about it.
And yet I did not doubt for even a moment that he really was trapped in an ever-repeating day. You might scoff at such doe-eyed gullibility, chide me for implicitly trusting the word of my social lesser; but you do not know Jeeves as I know him. There was something rotten in the state of Jeeves, and if he said a time-whatsit was to blame for it, then a blight and a plague on time-whatsits everywhere, as far as Bertram is concerned!)
“I’m entirely convinced, Jeeves,” I said, neglecting to mention that I had been all along. Perhaps Jeeves knew that, anyway, as he knew that a woman in an olive-green hat had just stopped to talk to a woman in violet dress. I could not be sure that this was the first we’d had this conversation, from his side of things. “You are stuck in a… a…”
“Time loop, sir.”
“Just such a one, yes.”
“I apologise for not being able to offer more scientific terminology. It is not a well-documented phenomenon.”
“Quite alright, old thing.” I turned away from the window, and towards the only well-d. ph. I cared about. “I am beginning to get the measure of the sitch. Time’s knotted itself like an old tie forgotten at the back of the closet, and pulled tight around your neck - and you can’t undo the bally thing for the life of you.”
“Yes, sir,” Jeeves confirmed - but it was a “yes, sir” that came from the very pits of despair, where Jeeves was being cruelly strangled by tangled time. My heart went out to him - it often does, but usually more recreationally. On this particular occasion, however, it was clearly setting out on a direly-needed mercy dash. “It has been… a great trial to endure.”
“Gosh. I can’t imagine.” And that was saying something - if there was one thing my teachers from third form onwards all saw lacking in me, then it was my overabundance of the imaginatory stuff. “How often have you done this song and dance, then?”
“I could not say,” Jeeves demurred, casting down his pickwickish eyes; and I feared he could say, but did not wish to, as the precise number would frighten me. “Enough for every moment to become ingrained in me.”
“Gosh,” I murmured, and wondered if, on an occasion such as this, it would be preux to apply the Wooster hand liberally to the Jeevesian shoulder. People frowned on such things under normal circs. - Jeeves among them - but dark days such as these permitted for extreme measures, what?
“In nineteen-and-a-half minutes, the telephone will ring,” Jeeves recited dully, as a schoolboy recites the Latin homework that has taken from him his will to live. “Mrs. Stephanie Pinker neé Byng will be on the line, urgently requiring you to come attend her in the small village of Wysbourne-on-the-Moor, where she claims to be stranded without money or transportation, and a sprained ankle.”
“Stiffy!” I exclaimed, with all due alarm one expresses when one’s girlish companion of many years has gotten herself into such awful trouble. “Oh, good Lord, the poor thing! Whatever can we-”
“This is a lie,” Jeeves continued. “The young lady in fact requires your presence to assist her husband, the Reverend Harold Pinker, in what I am informed is an annual friendly competition among the young clergy for a purely nominal title that is nonetheless greatly renowned among men of the cloth. Fearing that he will not perform to the judges’ satisfaction, she has devised some schemes to better his chances, which will, however, require an unwitting accomplice. Here, sir, she thought of you.”
“Well, quite,” said I. Many people think of me when the word ‘unwitting’ is brought up in conv., as I don’t go in for much witting as a rule. “Sounds like a dashed wheeze, eh? Where does she get off, summoning me under false pretences for her nefarious means?”
“Indeed, sir. After the seventh repetition, I too began taking a rather dim view of it.” Jeeves inclined his head. “After the seventieth, I made a habit out of taking the receiver off the telephone at the crucial moment just before her call, to prevent your involvement in the matter.”
I thanked him heartily in the name of my past selves, past which that unenviable cup had passed; which he accepted graciously, albeit with misery still pouring out of his every pore. 70 iterations of the Wysbourne-on-the-Moor Curate Competition will do that to you, I suppose. I could tell that Jeeves had clearly had a devil of a time with it - and then had had said d. of a t. over and over and over again. Repetition, the steady drip of water against stone, may wear down most substances on earth; including, it seemed, Jeevesian fortitude. I understood now why I had found him in such a state. Indeed, I marvelled a little that I had not found him in worse.
“Jeeves,” said I, after I had concluded my thanking, “this calls for brandy.”
“Yes, sir,” he agreed tonelessly, and rose on uncommonly unsteady legs that refused to glide as they usually did, to procure the decanter cum glass. He poured; yet when he moved to hand it to me, I shook the bean.
“For you, old thing,” I clarified. “Please, Jeeves. You have something of the ghostly pallor about you, and I should feel better if you’d had a snifter or two in you and the prospect of having to summon an undertaker - or indeed, an exorcist - did not loom over me quite so threateningly.”
“To imbibe in the presence of one’s employer is entirely improper, sir,” Jeeves admonished, brow creasing - but he drank, and I was jolly relieved to see the most minuscule spots of colour return to his cheeks.
“And you have no idea for how to get out of it?” Asked I, when he was looking less like a postmortem photograph. Woosters generally do not shy away from Death, and would laugh the Grim Reaper in the lack-of-face - but the mortality of Jeeves was a weightier matter to be reminded of, and I did not care for it. “None?”
“I have exhausted all viable possibilities, sir, and quite a few unviable ones.” Jeeves swirled his brandy as if he was contemplating the possibility of drowning himself in it. “For the past three iterations of this day, I have been grappling with the possibility of never continuing to move through linear time. I have accordingly failed to serve you this morning, as would be my duty - I hope you can find it in yourself to forgive me for it.”
I did place my hand upon his shoulder then, if just for a moment, in the hope it would express my forgiveness, and aid him somewhat in his weary grappling endeavours. And I needed the steadying; the thought had occurred to me that neither would I move forward in linear time. Neither would Stiffy, or Stinker Pinker, or the Drones, or my aged Aunts, or the whole bally world. It was a most dire prospect.
But at least we were being granted the gift of forgetting, being dunked in the River Lethe at midnight precisely, and starting anew all over again. Jeeves was not so fortunate.
“Do tell me more, old thing,” I encouraged him. “Stiffen your upper lip, and spill all! Perhaps, knowing of your past efforts, a new brainwave might manifest itself in either of us? You more likely than me, given precedent, but one does hear it said that it helps significantly, to look at a problem with a brand-new pair of e., what? This y. m. might yet make himself useful in the matter!”
Jeeves cleared his throat in a sheep-like manner that indicated his doubts, which would sting if it wasn’t entirely fair. I was no timeologist, if such a thing existed at all, and the newness of my seeing implements might yet fail us both. But it was worth having a crack at, by Jove; so crack I would!
“I grant that it could hardly do any harm to relate my futile attempts to break the loop, sir,” Jeeves ventured reluctantly, and I was determined to forgive him for his caution with the benevolence of one of those saintly chappies who turns the other cheek when slighted. “Initially, I confess to some joy at the prospect of improving on the initial day, which ended, I will admit, suboptimally for most of the parties involved. It was, in your words, sir, something of a wheeze, on that first go-around.”
“Gosh,” I gosh’d. I was jolly glad to have missed it.
“It is not always easy, doing what I do, sir. Often, I am prevented from giving full satisfaction by some aspect of the situation I had not considered at all, or not to the degree to which it eventually interfered. The opportunity to know, truly know all pieces of the puzzle, and devise the perfect solution… sir, I must confess that, in my hubris, I considered this an extraordinary pleasure.”
“Only natural,” I assured him. The fish-fed brain would obviously leap at such a chance, and perform true marvels of our modern age. I could not fault him for the needs of his most splendid organ.
“After two weeks, I knew how to spare you any and all humiliation. After three, I knew how to get a hundred pounds for myself out of the affair. After six, Mrs. Byng-Pinker vowed to name her firstborn after me. On week eleven, I succeeded in making the Reverend Pinker the Archbishop of York - at this point without, if you recall, even taking his wife’s initial call. As my count approached the anniversary of the original day, I had further improved the fortunes of every person in Wysbourne-on-the-Moor, your aunts, sir, and various young gentlemen and ladies of your acquaintance. As well as assorted members of my own family.”
“And the tie of time was no less knotted for it?”
“No, sir.”
“Ah.”
“By then, I had soured on the concept of looping time, and prioritised escape over the pointlessness of further perfecting an already perfect day. Accordingly, I… sir, I abandoned my post.” This was said with a shameful hanging of the Jeevesian head, and hair that, pomade-less, fell into his eyes. “I had only a day to seek out what counsel I could, so I fell into the habit of removing myself from the flat almost as soon as I had woken, to maximise the hours spent pursuing a solution. I was committed to returning to my work, to you, sir, for one final iteration of the day, once this solution had been found; or else beg forgiveness for my unexplained absence on that longed-for tomorrow.”
“Ah,” I ah’d again. This all seemed quite reasonable to me, a perfectly efficient way to go about matters; yet still, my old ticker squeezed painfully as I thought of all those other Bertie Woosters who had, as I, awoken all on their lonesome well into the morning hours, but had found no Jeeves on the settee. They must have disappeared at midnight, stopped existing as the clock rewound, and any thoughts they might have had on such a matter with them; yet I could not help but feel the confused agony of countless other Woosters bearing down on me, all abandoned without so much as a by-your-leave, fretting all day over Jeeves’ absence and fearing the worst.
I was very nearly angry with him then, oddly protective of those other Berties in their hypothetical distress; yet I knew it was not the time to say so. No doubt the feudal spirit in Jeeves had rebelled enough at the time, and I trusted that the sting of guilt remained keen enough without me adding further to it.
(And privately, selfishly, I thought myself quite smugly fortunate to not be counted among the numbers of that sorry lot. I still had him! I had my Jeeves! Hah! Hah, I say!)
“I studied new developments in the field of quantum physics, and consulted with as many experts I could feasibly contact in my scant hours - Prof. Dr. Einstein was most gracious and prompt in responding to my telegrams inquiring about time dilation, unlike Prof. Dr. Planck, who I have found an unpleasant and unreliable correspondent - all to no avail. I spoke with mathematicians, psychologists, philosophers - on one occasion, I even sat with a medium who claimed she would be able to connect me to the ghost of Spinoza, which was only marginally more unhelpful than the rest of my endeavours.” I noted that one of Jeeves’ hand was trembling slightly. Were I a weaker man - or perhaps much, much stronger - I might have been tempted to take it in my own and press it. “I… I sought a greater cause, then. Some disaster I was meant to prevent, lives I could save. Science could not explain my predicament. I wondered if there was God’s Plan in it.”
“And was there?” Asked I, hopeful.
“No, sir,” Jeeves murmured, hopeless. “I did what I could, I sought for a Sign, any sign… and there was none. And I know not what else to do.”
“There ought to have been.” I frowned. “Signs, I mean. I’ve always thought that you are destined for greater things than merely providing me with your exemplary service, Jeeves.”
“Sir,” Jeeves, too, frowned. “I am more than content-”
“Why, dash it, you ought to become Prime Minister! Are you quite certain, Jeeves, that that is not what God, the universe, and time itself all want from you?”
“No, sir,” Jeeves told me, pointed as a sharpened hedgehog. “Or this purgatory would have been concluded on Day 1226, when I ascended to the post.”
“Ah.” That was a blow and no mistake. My crest had never fallen so low. Here I had been, ascribing to Jeeves this greater Destiny - and he had achieved it, to no effect, without my remembering it! “What about-”
“I had, of course, succeeded in entering the peerage and direct line of royal succession half a year of personal time before this.”
“Ah.”
This complicated matters. Jeeves had evidently wracked his marvellous brain more than enough to exhaust all obvious solutions; I would have to draw on all my own negligible knowledge, mainly gleaned from the study of corking stories in the realm of speculative fictions, fantastical adventures, and the occasional moral tale, to as much as put the faintest spark of hope back into my valet’s loop-dulled eyes.
"...well, in some stories of comparable subject matter, the fellow is required to learn some great moral lesson to un-curse himself - un-knot his time-tie, in your case - though I think we can discard that line of inquiry, eh, Jeeves?” I flashed the pearly whites in his vague direction, in a vain attempt to cheer him. “There's no lesson that marvellous mind of yours is not already stuffed full with, ready to dispense them again on us lesser men as needed."
"You honour me to say so, sir, but I must disagree," Jeeves protested, inasmuch as he ever protests. He has this way of simply presenting an argument running counter to the y.m.'s earlier presentation of the selfsame, and it rather knocks me out of the water every time. "I have, in fact, learned a moral lesson already. I believe it was Day 724 on which I came to realise that it is futile of me to attempt to control each passing day as I have come to control this one, and that I am far from omnipotent, whatever my vanity may at times tell me."
"You, not omnipotent!?" I boggled. "Say it isn't so, Jeeves!"
"But it is, sir. And I did well to remember it. A necessary humbling which I was resolved to accept gracefully." Jeeves' mien went distinctly soupy. "If only the day had not promptly repeated."
"Ah. So you learned your m.l., and it did you no dashed good?"
"None dashed whatsoever," Jeeves said, and his usage of the d-word perhaps indicated how his nerves were by now so frayed they resembled the fringe of one of those corking flapper dresses.
"Well, that's hardly sporting," said I, and poured him another brandy. That the feudal spirit in him did not protest at the act further indicated that he was in dire need of it.
It was then that the ‘phone rang. Jeeves made a reflexive motion, but I pressed him back down by the shoulder, and went over to the blasted thing.
“We are not at home to Stiffy Byng-Pinkers,” I said into the receiver with a tone I cannot describe in any other terms than “acerbic”, and then promptly returned it to the cradle.
After a moment’s consideration, I lifted the r. off again, and placed it on the table beside the ‘phone. It was not the preux thing to do, and the Code of the Woosters squirmed at having so brusquely refused aid to a young lady of my acquaintance - but, dash it, the Wooster himself squirmed harder still at the thought of abandoning Jeeves in his distress just to get entangled in some Byngian scheme, or, worse still, involved him as well, when there was no point to a song and dance that would only repeat just the same tomorrow! Stiffy could find some other patsy for her machinations. I was for Jeeves today, and for Jeeves alone.
…though I feared, glancing back at Jeeves’ shoulders, curling under the weight of a world that would not move on from today, that I would hardly be of any use to the man either way.
What could I advise, after all, that all the learned men in Britain - Jeeves first and foremost among them! - could not? What could I say? What could I do?
I could play some ditty to lift his spirits, I supposed, wandering over to the piano. But even under the assumption that my usual tinkling ever l. Jeeves’ s., which I did not take for granted, I suspected my repertoire would disappoint him. Any sheet music I had in the flat, any song I had committed to memory at this point in time, Jeeves must have heard them all a thousand times on this day, and like as not grown jolly sick of them. I could attempt an original composition, or play some dance hall hit by ear, but… ah, it would do no good! It would do no good at all! Jeeves needed to be freed of his predicament, not have his cage gilded by musical entertainment.
Bent over the piano, I pondered; pondered like no gentleman had ever pondered before.
And lo and behold! My ponderage was rewarded with an idea. Not, perhaps, the best of its ilk, but Jeeves was already reduced to rather scraping the lowermost sections of the proverbial barrel - i.e. accepting advice, comfort, and brandy from self - and even the worst Wooster brainwave was better than none. If Jeeves had already pursued this line of inquiry, I’m sure he would let me know posthaste, and I would try my valiant best to procure a new l. of i. for him; and repeat ad infinitum.
“Jeeves?” I pressed my fingers to the keys, idly tickling the ivories into a few chords. Something of Gibbons’ - I think it must have been his ‘Who Am I’. “Have you… have you considered pursuing a tender pash?”
“Sir,” Jeeves said cooly, rallying from his despair to regard me with the sort of stuffed-and-scandalised-frog look that indicated I had spoken in a manner unbecoming for a gentleman.
“No, no, none of that!” I took my hand off the piano and wagged a finger at him. “I don’t mean- good lord, man, I don’t mean to insinuate anything uncouth! Only… it resolves things, doesn’t it? In the sort of corking little tales one’s grandmother tells one at bedtime. True Love’s kiss, and suchlike. Have you attempted to resolve matters via said T. L.’s k., Jeeves?”
“I have not.” Jeeves was still a little on the frosty (and froggy) side, but I could tell that he was willing to give my idea due consideration. I’ll say, that had me jolly chuffed - I rarely have ideas that Jeeves hasn’t had before, or considers worth considering. “Forgive me, sir, but I cannot imagine that this particular remedy would be effective outside of the confines of a storybook.”
“Oh, pish and tosh!” I scoffed, and scoffed with feeling. “Do you not believe in True Love, Jeeves?”
“Love, sir,” Jeeves said, and it seemed to me that he spoke with feeling, too - which one, I could not say. “May have considerable effect on the lives around us. But power enough to move time-”
“It goes by very quickly, when spent with one’s specific dream rabbit,” argued I, determined to force my point. “All the poet Johnnies say so - I’m sure you could quote me some, eh, Jeeves? - and even Madeline Basset, who may be as drippy as a wet dish towel but knows her way around such matters, would agree. Love’s just the ticket for you, old thing! You ought to go out and search for your heart’s other half- take the rest of the day off, take all this day off, for as long as it lasts, until you find-”
“I have already found love,” Jeeves interrupted, and then shot an affronted look down at his brandy, which was clearly to blame for it.
“Oh,” I gurgled. I felt a little fortunate that I was sitting down at the piano already. “That… ah… well, that is simply topping! Go, then, and… do what one does, in love. Propose, I imagine. Marry, perhaps, if you can get a licence at such short notice- ah, what am I saying. It’s you, Jeeves, of course you can get yourself a bally licence, eh?”
“That will be quite impossible, sir.” Jeeves avenged himself against his brandy by consuming the rest of it. “There are… complications, which render the match entirely unsuitable.”
“Gosh.” Jeeves, unlucky in love! My heart broke to hear it. Or at least it really ought to break - anything more in the range of a flutter would be utterly unseemly. “Is she married already, this sweetheart of yours?”
“No, sir.” Jeeves looked a little pained.
“Has she rejected you before?”
“No, sir.”
“Too young? Too old?”
“Not significantly, sir.” A sigh. “It is a matter of- of class difference.”
“Ah.” I comprehended. To most, this would not be much of a concern; as Rosie M. Banks so convincingly writes, class difference is but an obstacle for True Love to inevitably overcome, at which point there are wedding bells and slices of fish cake that don’t give a fig about either party’s class. But Jeeves… well, Jeeves is made of sterner, more rigid stuff. I could understand that his feudality would balk at the thought of pursuing a woman who stood higher than him, for all that he himself would stand above all others if I had more to say about it. “Does she love you?”
“Sir-!”
“Now, now, it’s a simple question, Jeeves. Does she?”
Jeeves regarded me with a most quizzical gaze. Finally, he cast his eyes down.
“I do not know,” he murmured. “I have not yet… spoken.”
I went to the armchair, and poured myself a brandy of my own on the way.
“You ought,” I told him, and promptly poured the brandy again, on this occasion down the Wooster throat. “Speak to her, I mean to say.”
“I should not think it advisable, sir,” Jeeves told me really rather soupily, and turned his gaze away.
“Not advisable, he says! Not advisable!” I slammed the glass onto the side table with more force than I had intended. “Look here, Jeeves! I am not speaking to you as your employer, or indeed as a human being who does not fancy the thought of being trapped in time for all eternity - I speak to you as simply another chap with a feeling heart, and as such I say-”
I stood. These were not impassioned words that could be spoken while remaining in a reclined position. These were standing words.
“What does it matter that she isn’t of your class? What does it matter, eh? If she loves you - as she must, she must, if she has even half a stray thought in her head! - what does any of it matter, on an endlessly-repeating day? This is your chance, dash it all! To speak, without fear of consequence! Why, if I were in your shoes-”
(I could not continue that line of thought. If I were in Jeeves’ shoes, I would have made a right ass of myself, pressing a suit towards one whose heart did not belong to me.
But at least I would have spoken, and known.
At least that.)
“Dash it all, you have all the world at your fingertips! Why let ‘I dare not’ wait upon ‘I would’, when even if - IF! - this filly does not return your love, she will have forgotten her rejection on the morrow, as would all she told of it? And if she loves you- if she loves you…”
I faltered, and fought to rally. Brave heart now, Bertram. Courage. Think of the cruelty of the cage, and of setting free one’s beloved.
“Well,” said I, remaining in a state of relative unralliment, but knowing I would not be able to do better even if I were given my own infinite repetitions of the day. “You might try True Love’s kiss then, after all. Even if it has no effect whatsoever on your time-knot, it might still be a quite e-enjoyable wheeze, what? To know that your secret love is not in vain.”
“Mr. Wooster,” said Jeeves, stricken. I had gone too far, I realised; ‘sir’, oh, ‘sir’ I can deal with, even said in the soupiest and rummiest of tones, but I had yet to brave a ‘Mr. Wooster’-ing intact.
(Or perhaps it had something to do with the dust motes that had gotten into my eye. This is the sort of thing that happens when your valet is stuck in looping time, and fails to give the flat its morning dusting. How dashed embarrassing.)
“Oh hush, never you mind me. I do hope it goes well for you,” said I, in a voice as brittle as a dry biscuit - though do not doubt that I meant every word, however biscuitish it was uttered. “I suppose I will come to know tomorrow - or else know nothing of this at all.”
I turned away and went to the piano, though I could not make my hands play. They lay on the keys like millstones. This had only happened once before, and it had been on the day I first realised I loved-
…ah, love. It’s a most rummy thing. I cannot recommend ever being alone in it.
“Sir,” Jeeves said again. I did not turn. I was quite busy not-playing the piano. “Mr. Wooster.”
I thought about the first few chords of ‘Garden in the Rain’. My fingers even moved into the right positions for them. I could not make myself press down the keys.
A touch on my shoulder - Jeeves’ hand, I knew. I would know his t. and his h. from all others in the world.
“Bertram,” said Jeeves’ voice, though this was quite impossible, as Jeeves would never utter such an indiscreet- “I have misled you. It is not class alone that has kept me from speaking my heart.”
And saying so, he turned me by the shoulder, bent down, and kissed me.
It was a rather valetish kiss, unfailingly polite; and when it was done, all too soon, Jeeves straightened up again, and said “forgive me, sir” in such a chastened tone as if there really was something to beg forgiveness for.
The avid readers of my chronicles will surely be aware that, whereas other men - Jeeves, for instance - shine in a crisis, Bertie Wooster rather seems to dull. I am no dashed good under the sort of pressure that turns better fellows into brilliantine diamonds, and all too easily fuss and fluster and sorely disappoint whosoever has placed their faith in me. It stings the pride rather keenly to admit as much, but I have come to the realisation that it is not very preux, to lie to oneself, and all who might read my publications. We Woosters stand by our failings, with all suitable humility.
This moment, however, shall stand out as a shining pinnacle of glorious achievement in the Wooster annals. This once, this once, I did not gape and “gosh” and gormlessly blink; on this one singular occasion - the only one, I daresay, that ever truly mattered - I took action, and took it with aplomb.
I raised up my hands, which had somehow lost all millstoneish qualities in the past five seconds, and threw the Wooster arms around the retreating Jeevesian shoulders. It occurred to me that this seemed to be just where the W. a. belonged.
“I forgive you anything and everything, old thing,” I told him. “But not that, Jeeves. That owes no dashed forgiveness, you hear? By George, I ought to thank you under tears for it!”
His orbs met mine - and, I say, what a change went through them, right there for me to behold!
I have often thought of the day that Pickwick finally went up to the Heavens to join the great canine chorus. That moment when all earthly pains and grievances sloughed off him like so much mud after a good bath, his sight cleared, his joints bending freely, and his just reward spread out before him. For many years, this has been my vision of true happiness; the Reaper’s long-awaited appointment with old Pickwick, and the great relief the poor chap must have felt when shuffling off this mortal coil, towards all the glories that lay beyond it.
I saw this look in Jeeves’ eyes, then. The pekingese’s rapture glowed behind the darkness of his pupils, and, oh, how I rejoiced to see it!
“That is most generous of you, sir, but no thanks will be necessary,” he said; but, oh, the twinkle in his eye! The light quirk of his mouth! His arms, which had closed to embrace me in turn! Words fail one. So I only golly’d lightly, and pressed closer to my most beloved paragon of a valet.
(I had been called generous once or twice in my life; never before had it so strongly inspired me to give even more.)
When we once again locked lips, it was a rather less feudal affair, which would make my pen blush were I to take down the details in writing. A gentleman does not, as a rule, tell tales of kissing; and while I would not dare to claim I understood the mind of the valet, Jeeves tells me that any proper gentleman’s gentleman holds discretion in a similar regard.
I will therefore draw the mantle- cloak? One of the dashed fabricky things - of silence over any further proceedings that followed our urgent embrace (and, perhaps, True Love’s first kiss) by the piano, and hope my most understanding readers will forgive me for it.
“Jeeves? Will you grant the young master one wish, and one alone?”
“I endeavour at all times to give utmost satisfaction,” Jeeves responded. I could feel the tenderness resonating in the words, resting my head upon his bare chest as I did - among his countless other qualifications, Jeeves had revealed himself in those silence-mantled hours to be a most excellent pillow for the y. m. to rest his brow on. “Indeed, I expect to find more trouble in limiting myself to one singular wish, than in granting it.”
“It concerns tomorrow. Or the today that will be tomorrow,” said I - and felt his hand still where it had been idly petting through my hair as if Bertram were naught more but an affectionate feline (which I would not mind being, for it would give me permission to lounge in Jeeves’ lap even in public.)
“Let us not speak of tomorrows,” Jeeves implored me, very quietly. “I do not wish to think of-”
“Oh, hush, I know, I know.” I caught his hand in mine and pressed a kiss to the calluses dotted all over it. I have a few calluses of my own, though mostly from writing. He does more honest work in my service, my Jeeves, and his fingers show it. “One wish only - you must understand, Jeeves, I can’t let this day end without asking it of you.”
I had never tasted such paradise as then, lying in my man’s arms and the comfort of my bed at an unsuitably late hour of the afternoon, having successfully evaded all ‘phone calls and any knocks at the door - but I was only all too keenly aware that the hours of Eden were likely numbered. At midnight, Jeeves and I might well be pulled out of our private heaven like a pekingese being reincarnated entirely against his will; and in such a circumstance, it seemed only prudent to take precautions.
“Very well, sir,” Jeeves sighed, though I daresay there was something of the soup in his tone that I did not like. Fortunately, I liked- nay, loved all the rest of him well enough to graciously overlook it.
“Promise me only this: kiss me again. Not now, but tomorrow. First thing in the morning if you can manage it, dear thing, but I’ll settle for your earliest convenience.”
“I- sir. You will not remember today. You will not expect-”
“No. But I will want.” I turned the Wooster bean to regard him with something approaching soppiness, and a great deal of feeling. “Dash it, I’ve always wanted, and certainly always will! So you must, you must proclaim your reciprocal interest to me again, if all the kissing and True Loving we’ve done today has not succeeded in resolving this accursed loop. Which I am perfectly confident it will, thank you very much, despite you playing Doubting Thomas viz. the power of T. L.’s k.”
I swallowed.
“But in case I- if I am to- forget. Disappear. Be replaced by some other B. W. W. who has never known the joy of the tender lip-press with his valet - well, I should want him to learn. Again, and again, and again. I want this,” I wound the slender Wooster fingers through those of Jeeves, and rested them together above his heart, “for forever, or for a day, or for a day that lasts forever. It matters little to me. Will you promise?” I batted the lashes at him most imploringly. “Please?”
“...yes, Bertram, sir,” Jeeves vowed, in barely more than a breath; but I saw in his gaze that he meant it, and would live and die and perhaps loop-de-loop by these words. “I promise.”
And when I awoke uncommonly early to the dawn of a new day with a gloriously undressed gentleman’s gentleman of the Adonis-ish cast still in my bed (and, as I should later learn, seventeen angry/concerned telegrams from various friends, Drones, and aunts resting at my doorstep following my complete absence and unreachability the previous day), Jeeves did indeed make more than good on that solemn p. I had wheedled out of him.