Jeeves/Wooster Dictionary Fraglets: 3-4/20

[mercyrobot]

More fraglet-ing! Previous efforts here; table of doom here.

These are a bit longer-- 800 and 1000 words respectively-- would your eyeballs and brains prefer it if future specimens of that length were given their own posts? I'm never sure how long is too long.

Both extremely G-rated. Perhaps I'll try my hand at something steamier next time if I can solve for x in the equation octosyllabic + x = buggery. I was always pants at algebra.

P.S. These aren't so very fluffy. "Gala" may even sting a bit. I R SRS RITER. See the Emo Gussie? He is a warning.


3. In which there is a party, and it's probably gone to off-stage:
Gala

Careful readers of my chronicles will have long known that my Uncle Percy is better known these days as Lord Worplesdon, and that Jeeves was once employed by same. The brighter sparks amongst the public might have even paused to wonder or muse, 'Wait a moment, how is it they didn't meet sooner?' Well, the fact is we did.

I doubt he remembers it, and I'm certainly not going to ask, but in truth I met Jeeves some five summers before the recorded history of the thing. I say summers, but it was winter. Christmas if you're one of those types that note down important dates.

At the time, I was one of those bright young Oxford bloods you hear about, capering all over in search of the next blancmange or what-have-you to deposit on somebody's unsuspecting onion. I'd been ferried against my will to my Uncle Percy's annual yuletide bash, some aunt or other (probably of the species Agatha) having put her sensibly-booted foot down on the point of young Bertram haring off to sunnier climes with the siblings Potter-Pirbright.

Christmas Eve found the last of the Woosters understandably pining for white sands and casinos while cooped up in a stately home whose mausoleum-like qualities no amount of wreaths and baubles could disguise. I doubt I have to tell you that I was sorely lacking in the festive spirit. Come to that, I was sorely lacking in any spirit at all, as someone (likely again Auntus Horribilis) had got word round that I wasn't to be drinking. Honestly, one little soft-shoe atop the dessert course and you're branded for life.

But I digress. Back to the thing at hand, it's safe to say I was not making much of a go at putting forth my customary sunny disposish and best foot. After a stifling day indoors of card-playing and being interrogated on my education and future, I finally managed to escape whilst the rest of the house went up to spend a couple of hours dressing to the nines for the impending binge. Not that there was any so-called haven to which I might escape. The result was a disheartened sort of mooching-- I might even venture to call it skulking-- about the grounds.

About halfway round the house I made to light myself a cigarette and found that my lighter, which was normally a faithful obj. that had stood me well, had given up the ghost and was no more likely to spark than a pile of wet straw. I spied some figures near the back of the kitchen and turned my skulking or mooching in their direction, unwilling to be forced back indoors by such a trifle. Only when the laughing and generally merry-making group fell silent and started playing at statues did I realise they belonged to the household's army-sized staff-- though if I'd paused to consider it, who else would be lurking out back of a kitchen?

"What ho, all," I greeted the detachment, feeling rather like a magistrate in an unlicensed night-club, or how I imagine one might feel were he to lack the sense not to brazen on inside. "Don't mind me. I was simply hoping one of you might have such a thing as a light."

The chap that rallied round, of course, was none other than Jeeves. He produced a lighter out of nowhere and struck it to flame with some invisible sleight of hand. "Allow me, sir," he said.

On pure instinct I reached out to steady his wrist, though it needed no steadying, and I was puffing away in mere moments. "Thank you," I said, suddenly somewhat unnerved. I glanced up and our eyes met, which only served to unnerve me further. In hindsight it's all too clear what it was and why it was, but just then it was simply unnervement, if such a word exists.

That was more or less that. With no more to be said, I beat a hasty retreat and left them to it, but spent some little while on a bench a couple of corners over lighting the next off the one before and wondering if it was simply the brisk walk that had kicked the heart muscle into an odd sort of rhythm.

'But see here, Wooster,' one might say if one were so inclined, 'why would you never ask Jeeves about that?'

I wouldn't hesitate to, if, 'I say, did you light a cigarette for me while I was down from Oxford one Christmas?' happened to be the q. in q., but it so happens that it does not, thank you very much. No, the thing I'd really like to ask, if I could screw up the courage, is more in the way of, 'That shadowy figure in the doorway when I was playing the piano late Christmas night-- was that you, by any chance?'

I can't ask a thing like that, you see, no more than I can do anything but throw this page onto a nicely-stoked fire. The best possible result is that the e. in q. was so insignificant to him that he remembers nothing of it. The worst, and it's a very bad worst, is Jeeves wondering what might have moved me to ask such a thing. To a brain like his, it would be mere hopscotch from there to working out precisely what moved me.

Well, there's a better result I could hope for, but it's not a possible one, not in this life or the next. 'Yes, sir, it was I, for I loved you from the moment you touched my hand,' is never to be forthcoming. More's the pity, but there you have the lot Bertram has drawn. It's just that sometimes, when Jeeves steps into the fray with an invisibly-struck light at the ready, I say 'thank you' and our eyes meet, I imagine some happy world where that moment was the same thing to both of us.

4. In which an unnamed narrator pokes fun at the romance genre:
Careful

Years of caution and circumspection, a precise science of how long a gaze could trail or a hand linger, smiles kept for solitary moments and tones schooled into placid indifference-- this entire arsenal of evasions and illusions was backed by even more years of practiced discipline, and all it took to send it crumbling into rubble was a single stray gunshot.

The plot may seem familiar: the hero rushes to the side of his wounded secret-beloved and at the most crucial of touch-and-go moments, makes his confession. Perhaps there is a clasping of hands, a kiss that drags the object of his affection back from the brink. A whispered 'you mustn't leave me' or some such declaration, and after a sleepless night of anxious vigil, all is well and the lovers sail happily ever after off into the sunset.

It didn't precisely happen that way.

What happened, precisely, was that Jeeves did not arrive at Totleigh Towers in time to contrive a reason for his employer not to join the shooting party, and so Bertie was obliged to go along. Jeeves did not arrive in time to see the footman clatter in and demand someone go for the doctor, nor did he arrive in time to hear the anguished moans fade away as the ether dragged Bertie under.

It was all over, in fact, by the time he descended from the train. None of the customary dramatic moments were his to play out.

All he was granted was a piece of heart-stopping news from Butterfield: "You'd better go straight to the drawing-room, Mr Jeeves. Mr Wooster's been shot."

Jeeves dropped the bags where he stood and ran directly there, the pounding blood in his ears drowning out whatever else Butterfield was saying.

One might now expect a tense scene, a terrified man bursting through the fraught silence of the room and all eyes turning towards him.

What Jeeves instead came upon in the corridor was Dahlia Travers, annoyed but not mourning or apparently even worried, lecturing Harold Pinker like a naughty child while clipping him repeatedly on the side of the head with a newspaper.

"What possessed a bumbling oaf such as yourself to take hold of a rifle of all things I'll never know!" Dahlia bellowed, punctuating the admonition with a resounding thwap of the paper and scoring a direct hit on his ear.

"Ouch! I said I was sorry, Dahlia!" Harold exclaimed, vainly attempting to duck the next blow and upsetting a Ming Dynasty vase in the process.

Dahlia averted her eyes from the shattering ceramics and noticed Jeeves. "Oh, thank goodness you're here, Jeeves! He's out of his head and talking nonsense, not that that's anything new, but I think he asked for you."

Sense wormed its way through the frozen terror to tell Jeeves that given this scene, the circumstances could not be so very dire-- Mrs Travers was by no means of the soft and sensitive Madeline Bassett kidney, but certainly she would shed a tear or two for her favourite nephew if the occasion called for it-- but Jeeves had to see for himself.

He flung open the drawing-room doors and nearly collapsed with relief when he saw Bertie, lying on a sofa with his entire right leg swathed in bandages. He was clearly dazed and possibly in some pain, but largely, mercifully unharmed.

"Jeeves, old thing!" Bertie slurred. "S'that you, or'm I dreaming?"

Jeeves was vaguely aware of Dahlia ushering out a housemaid and what might've been a nurse and shutting the door behind her, but true to the requirements of the genre, his focus was on one person alone as he flew to the side of the sofa and knelt down.

There was, indeed, a clasping of hands. Bertie looked down at them as though they belonged to someone else. "Now I know'm dreaming," he said. "Or dead. 'm I dead, Jeeves? Is this heaven?"

Here was the moment in which the already fissured armament of precaution shattered with a spectacular bang to shame all rifle shots. He could always argue hallucination later if necessary, and therefore untangled one of his hands from Bertie's to tenderly stroke his cheek. "No, dearest," he said, unmasked and unarmoured. "You are alive, and I am here."

The glazed blue eyes cleared for just half a moment, blinking with something like surprise before drooping back into their drugged haze as a wobbly smile graced Bertie's lips. "If you kiss me, I'll wake up."

Paying no heed to the possibility that anyone could enter at any moment, Jeeves leaned down and proved him wrong.

It's usual to end these things with some assurance of future happiness, of the sailing-into of sunsets and all that, but those sorts of things are ten a penny. Let us instead simply say that Bertie's leg healed, and though in later years the ghost of the injury did make itself known on occasion, Jeeves was always there for him to lean on, which he vastly preferred to using a cane.