Jeeves Grieves

The atmosphere in the Drones' Club was thickly postprandial, a pleasant miasma of tobacco smoke, port, fizz water splashing into amber whiskey, just as Old Plum--Pelham Grenville (P. G.) Wodehouse to you--had often described it.

Bertie Wooster, pensive on a leather sofa, brooded alternately about his aunt's unreasonableness and the subject all the chaps had been champing at dinner--Old Plum's incredible antics in Berlin.

"It's not so much his posh rooms at the Adlon, if you know what I mean, though they're in ghastly taste," mused Bertie. "After all, Plum has oceans of the stuff."*

"True, Bertie," bleated the Hon. Freddie Threepwood, hitting the nail with unaccustomed vigor. "But Bertie, I mean to say, what is one to make of the nauseating news that Swedish journalist fellow just dished up, that Plum has signed on the jolly old dotted with a Nazi film company for two pictures, and that that frightful cad Hitler is giving him special 'courtesy marks' for good behavior? Well, what I mean to say is--fun's fun, but dash it all --." The Hon. Freddie collapsed into bewildered silence.

"Kindest thing," pontificated the Club Bore from his murky corner, "is to say he's a misguided, political nit-wit."

"That won't wash," said Bertie firmly. "Why, it wasn't so long ago that my man Jeeves was reading me some fearful tripe Plum seemed to have written in some transatlantic mag--Saturday Afternoon Post, was it? Some such name. Well, anyhow, some ghastly nonsense about Fascism not mattering as long as it lets one live in comfort. Y'know, sometimes," said Bertie, hitching his R.A.F. uniform to ease the Wooster rump into a more comfortable posture, "sometimes I think Old Plum is getting a bit overripe. An aunt of mine--"

A phone call providentially interrupted what threatened to be a lengthy and irrelevant tale. Bertie came back shaking his head. "Speaking of Jeeves," he said. "That was Jeeves himself. He just heard the news. Seemed to take it pretty hard. Y'know," said Bertie, in an awed, incredulous tone, "I believe the poor old blighter was squiffed."

*Wodehousian for the long green, mazuma, dough, cash.

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