Carry On Jeeves

Carry On, Jeeves is a collection of ten short stories by P. G. Wodehouse. It was first published in the United Kingdom on 9 October 1925 by Herbert Jenkins, London, and in the United States on 7 October 1927 by George H. Doran, New York.

• Short story

								
TO BERNARD LE STRANGE




                               Contents


                     1--Jeeves Takes Charge         

                     2--The Artistic Career of Corky

                     3--Jeeves and the Unbidden Guest

                     4--Jeeves and the Hard-Boiled Egg

                     5--The Aunt and the Sluggard

                     6--The Rummy Affair of Old Biffy

                     7--Without the Option

                     8--Fixing it for Freddie

                     9--Clustering Round Young Bingo

                    10--Bertie Changes his Mind

  
                        1--Jeeves Takes Charge


Now, touching this business of old Jeeves--my man, you know--how do
we stand? Lots of people think I'm much too dependent on him. My Aunt
Agatha, in fact, has even gone so far as to call him my keeper. Well,
what I say is: Why not? The man's a genius. From the collar upward he
stands alone, I gave up trying to run my own affairs within a week of
his coming to me. That was about half a dozen years ago, directly after
the rather rummy business of Florence Craye, my Uncle Willoughby's
book, and Edwin, the Boy Scout.

The thing really began when I got back to Easeby, my uncle's place in
Shropshire. I was spending a week or so there, as I generally did in
the summer; and I had had to break my visit to come back to London
to get a new valet. I had found Meadowes, the fellow I had taken to
Easeby with me, sneaking my silk socks, a thing no bloke of spirit
could stick at any price. It transpiring, moreover, that he had looted
a lot of other things here and there about the place, I was reluctantly
compelled to hand the misguided blighter the mitten and go to London
to ask the registry office to dig up another specimen for my approval.
They sent me Jeeves.

I shall always remember the morning he came. It so happened that the
night before I had been present at a rather cheery little supper, and
I was feeling pretty rocky. On top of this I was trying to read a book
Florence Craye had given me. She had been one of the house-party at
Easeby, and two or three days before I left we had got engaged. I was
due back at the end of the week, and I knew she would expect me to
have finished the book by then. You see, she was particularly keen on
boosting me up a bit nearer her own plane of intellect. She was a girl
with a wonderful profile, but steeped to the gills in serious purpose.
I can't give you a better idea of the way things stood than by telling
you that the book she'd given me to read was called Types of Ethical
Theory, and that when I opened it at random I struck a page beginning:

    The postulate or common understanding involved in speech is
    certainly co-extensive, in the obligation it carries, with the
    social organism of which language is the instrument, and the ends
    of which it is an effort to subserve.

All perfectly true, no doubt; but not the sort of thing to spring on a
lad with a morning head.

I was doing my best to skim through this bright little volume when
the bell rang. I crawled off the sofa and opened the door. A kind of
darkish sort of respectful Johnnie stood without.

'I was sent by the agency, sir,' he said. 'I was given to understand
that you required a valet.'

I'd have preferred an undertaker; but I told him to stagger in, and
he floated noiselessly through the doorway like a healing zephyr.
That impressed me from the start. Meadowes had had flat feet and used
to clump. This fellow didn't seem to have any feet at all. He just
streamed in. He had a grave, sympathetic face, as if he, too, knew what
it was to sup with the lads.

'Excuse me, sir,' he said gently.

Then he seemed to flicker, and wasn't there any longer. I heard him
moving about in the kitchen, and presently he came back with a glass on
a tray.

'If you would drink this, sir,' he said, with a kind of bedside manner,
rather like the royal doctor shooting the bracer into the sick prince.
'It is a little preparation of my own invention. It is the Worcester
Sauce that gives it its colour. The raw egg makes it nutritious. The
red pepper gives it its bite. Gentlemen have told me they have found it
extremely invigorating after a late evening.'

I would have clutched at anything that looked like a lifeline that
morning. I swallowed the stuff. For a moment I felt as if somebody had
touched off a bomb inside the old bean and was strolling down my throat
with a lighted torch, and then everything seemed suddenly to get all
right. The sun shone in through the window; birds twittered in the
tree-tops; and, generally speaking, hope dawned once more.

'You're engaged!' I said, as soon as I could say anything.

I perceived clearly that this cove was one of the world's workers, the
sort no home should be without.

'Thank you, sir. My name is Jeeves.'

'You can start in at once?'

'Immediately, sir.'

'Because I'm due down at Easeby, in Shropshire, the day after tomorrow.'

'Very good, sir.' He looked past me at the mantelpiece. 'That is an
excellent likeness of Lady Florence Craye, sir. It is two years since
I saw her ladyship. I was at one time in Lord Worplesdon's employment.
I tendered my resignation because I could not see eye to eye with his
lordship in his desire to dine in dress trousers, a flannel shirt, and
a shooting coat.'

He couldn't tell me anything I didn't know about the old boy's
eccentricity. This Lord Worplesdon was Florence's father. He was the
old buster who, a few years later, came down to breakfast one morning,
lifted the first cover he saw, said 'Eggs! Eggs! Eggs! Damn all eggs!'
in an overwrought sort of voice, and instantly legged it for France,
never to return to the bosom of his family. This, mind you, being a bit
of luck for the bosom of the family, for old Worplesdon had the worst
temper in the county.

I had known the family ever since I was a kid, and from boyhood up this
old boy had put the fear of death into me. Time, the great healer,
could never remove from my memory the occasion when he found me--then
a stripling of fifteen--smoking one of his special cigars in the
stables. He got after me with a hunting-crop just at the moment when I
was beginning to realize that what I wanted most on earth was solitude
and repose, and chased me more than a mile across difficult country.
If there was a flaw, so to speak, in the pure joy of being engaged
to Florence, it was the fact that she rather took after her father,
and one was never certain when she might erupt. She had a wonderful
profile, though.

'Lady Florence and I are engaged, Jeeves,' I said.

'Indeed, sir?'

You know, there was a kind of rummy something about his manner.
Perfectly all right and all that, but not what you'd call chirpy.
It somehow gave me the impression that he wasn't keen on Florence.
Well, of course, it wasn't my business. I supposed that while he had
been valeting old Worplesdon she must have trodden on his toes in
some way. Florence was a dear girl, and, seen sideways, most awfully

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