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the_elyan5. The Last March of the Woosters
If there’s one thing these professional writer chappies – the sort that grin out from your morning paper and promise to teach you all the Secrets of the Craft – are hot on, it’s Pacing. Pacing, they are always telling you, is Key. Get your pacing wrong, and you are sunk, your audience reaching for its coats and telling the waiter they won’t be staying, and to put the starters on their slate.
Now normally, pacing is not something I worry myself too much with – the story just sort of flows out at its own speed, and I write The End at whatever seems a suitable point. But on this occasion, I think the nabobs of the quill and foolscap may be on the money, so I will hurry matters along somewhat.
The truth of the thing is that the next few days, as we hiked our way toward the mountain in the indeterminate distance, were not among the most thrilling of a life packed with incident and adventure. I am sure some writers would expect their readership to relive the march with them, in order to reach a fuller understanding of the central character’s motivations, and all that sort of rot, but I am of a more kindly disposition, so will spare the rod.
Suffice it to say that each day passed with little to enliven a weary tread – dust and ashes seemed to be the main decorative motif in the area, and trickling fountains or sinuous rills were not much in evidence. Even luncheon – usually the highlight of the Drones Club Walking Day – had been reduced to whatever water was left, and a sort of wafer arrangement which Jeeves had acquired somewhere on our travels, and of which he seemed to have an inexhaustible supply. It beat going hungry, of course, but only in a photo-finish after a Steward’s Enquiry.
During this trudge, Jeeves related to me what had happened during my post-arachnid spell in the land of Nod. Having temporarily removed Steggles from the picture – a wise move if ever there was one – he found that the brutish thing had wrapped me in a cocoon of webs, and left me in the roadway. He had thought his master dead, and while I have the highest respect for the man’s stiff upper lip, I fancy a tear or two might have been shed at the thought (to say nothing of that of facing the estate with my slate at the Drones Club bar). Recalling the task laid upon me, he took the family heirloom, and transferred it to a safe place somewhere about his person. Only after he had done this did he notice what I had taken to be the local gendarmerie, removing my body to their local lodgings. These were not in fact boys in blue, it transpired, but another detachment of the chaps we had met on the road, and just as ill-bred – having said which, they did at least confirm that I wasn’t dead, though likely to be so soon, once the hairy beast had left me to cure for a while.
My presence removed from the scene, Jeeves was left with the problem of what to do with the arachnid, which was now returning for a second pass. Though I find it difficult to credit of one of his temperament, apparently he inflicted a mortal wound upon it, using a Swiss Army Knife which he habitually carries. He seemed unwilling to talk about it very much, which I could understand, but acknowledged that the device for getting stones out of horses hooves had proved equally expedient in getting spiders guts out of their foul hides. It was not a pretty picture, and I was happy to leave it untinted further.
Partway down the path leading out of the spider’s lair, Jeeves had come across the tower in which I had been temporarily incarcerated. Finding few of our disreputable chums about, and still no sign of Steggles, he apparently announced his presence by signing a medley of Songs from the Shows. Having occasionally heard Jeeves’s attempts to harness the Euterpean and Terpsichorean Muses about the flat, I found this a difficult image to conjure up, but desperation brings out the best in a man, I suppose. Having dispatched any locals characters he encountered – I did not press him on this point, but I suspect a sharp look must have been employed – he found me, and returned me to consciousness and full possession of my faculties.
It was some days march before we reached the mountain, and whatever it was that I was expected to do. I became sure we were nearing the denouement – if that’s the word I’m looking for – because the ring had been growing steadily heavier. I could not begin to explain this, and suspected the sensation might in fact be a reaction to sulphur fumes, but nonetheless it suggested that we near nearing the final point. The mountain loomed up before us in the manner of a doorman at a club for which one’s membership has expired, and I felt my resolve begin to waver.
“Is this it, do you think, Jeeves? Does X mark the spot?”
Jeeves pointed up toward a stone doorway partway up the hill, from which smoke was issuing in a disconcerting manner.
“I would rather suggest, Sir, that we have indeed reached our destination. I suggest we commence the final climb”
I sighed heavily. “Well, lead on, Macbeth”
Jeeves coughed, but said nothing, and we began our ascent.
6. Death of a Family Heirloom
Alert readers may by this point be pursing their lips, pens poised over paper to enquire of the Editor as to the disappearance of Steggles. “This Wooster is a menace to literary society”, the resulting letters will howl, “he introduces characters willy-nilly into the story, then shoves them offstage again as it suits his whim, without any thought to the effect on the reading public!” They will continue on to express their further displeasure at Bertram’s all-round literary and general conduct, and to demand their seven shillings and threepence ha’penny annual subscription returned at the Editor’s expense. It is to them that I must briefly turn, before concluding my narrative.
The matter of Steggles had been causing me no little concern at this time. After being removed by Jeeves from the spidery tableau earlier, not a peep had been heard of his presence. Assuming Jeeves’s Viking strain had not come suddenly to the fore in a whirl of berserkering massacre, I assumed Steggles must be at large somewhere in the landscape, but had no idea where. An Etonian thwarted is a dangerous thing to leave lying around at the best of times – one with the low villainy and cunning of a Steggles was positively incendiary.
Be that as it may, the area remained free of his foul presence, as I struggled up to the doorway. Jeeves, unusually for him, had dropped behind, so I entered the mountain, and whatever lay beyond it, alone. A sort of avenue of stone projected out from the cave entrance, and beneath it, I could see lava and other fiery matters. I fancied what was called for was to deposit the ring into the lava – certainly, if anything more complex was demanded of Bertram, comprehensive instructions should have been posted somewhere. I took the thing out, and held it out over the flames, ready to do my duty for King, Country and Uncle Fangald. Then I had a funny turn.
The way I felt, thinking back, was rather similar to when Pongo Twistleton brought some cigars into the Drones which his Uncle had acquired for him somewhere in South America. I smoked one of them at the bar, and while the flavour was pleasingly mellow, with just a soupcon of cloves, the grey matter failed to relax or the vision to clear. Indeed, I fancied that Johnson the bartender had turned into a largeish sort of frog, and that Pongo himself had sprouted a number of extra limbs, to say nothing of a second head. The effect was short-lived, and my brain lost none of its customary sharpness as a result, but I politely declined Pongo’s offer of a second, and made my way home in something of a reverie. I had not experienced anything further of the kind until this moment, poised upon the brink.
The thing was, I couldn’t for the life of me see why I should toss the bally thing away. It was gold, after all, and while I was hardly short of funds, it was still worth a quid or two, and it seemed a waste to consign it to the roaring flames. Also, there was the matter of my ancestry – I had no idea which Wooster it was who had acquired the ring in the first place, but they must have had a reason to add it to the family estate, and was it respectful to dispose of it in this manner on an uncle’s whim? On the whole, I couldn’t see whose business it was except my own, and I was firmly of the opinion that the ring was worth hanging on to. After all, it might be a powerful talisman of Woosterishness down the ages, and belong in a museum. Maybe one day my heirs might look at it and fondly remember Bertram, and thank their lucky stars that it hadn’t been lost. So, what with one thing and another, I thought it best to turn away from the raging furnace, and to put the ring on my finger.
Steggles, it appears, had other ideas, for it was at this dramatic juncture that he chose to make his re-appearance. Screaming something inaudible, he ran straight toward me, a black look in his eyes that I recognised from brushes with Stilton Cheesewright, and sundry of the Capital’s Justices of the Peace. He launched himself at me in a manner I found less than comradely, and knocked me to the ground on the edge of the abyss.
“Steggles, Steggles”, I cried, “what is all this? Would you crave a boon, Steggles? I will help, if I may”.
But answer came there none, except a demented hiss, and I realised that all thoughts of the ties that bind Etonians together had left the Steggles cranium for more commodious accommodation. But then, he was a Cambridge man, so perhaps such behaviour should be excused.
What I had not expected at all, and which really took the proverbial giddy biscuit, was when he tried to eat my finger. I don’t know if you’ve ever been bitten by an Etonian – it’s not a common experience, I will admit – but we are taught to be thorough in all things, and once Steggles had taken a shine to the finger on which the ring was sitting, I knew I was in for a rather thin time of it. I swatted at whatever pieces of the appalling creature I could reach, but it was to no avail, and with a snickering howl of triumph, he extracted a sizeable lump of the fourth digit of my writing hand, and with it the ring. I wasn’t in the best frame of mind to assess his subsequent behaviour, but he did seem to exhibit a degree of glee at this act that I found unsporting, to say the least. If one has bitten off the finger of a sometime fellow member of the Drones, one should at least offer some humble contrition, not dance around in the manner of an Indian brave summoning a storm. I was, alas, too concerned with the pain to give vent to these feelings, and in any case the point was rendered moot when he missed his footing, gave a final gurgling scream, and plunged into the abyss. The lava closed over him, and as I was trying to think of a suitable epitaph for a man like Steggles, there was a colossal crash, and the mountain shook like a dog emerging from a river. The ring, I guessed, had finally met its end.
I was aware of a shimmering presence by my side, and looked up to see Jeeves proffering a gloved hand.
“If you would care to follow me, Sir. I fear our surroundings are a trifle unstable”.
“You know, Jeeves, I think you have a point. Lead, and I shall follow.”
“Very good, sir”.
The next thing I recall with any clarity was lying on a rock, somewhere above the tumultuous fray of boiling lava, as the world came to an end about our ears. This might have caused lesser hearts to blench, but Jeeves and I are both of sturdy English stock, and more than equal to the challenge. Jeeves bound my abused hand with bandages and a soothing unguent, then, miraculously, produced from the depths of the rough cloak he wore a small decanter, and a cut-glass goblet.
“Jeeves”, I said with feeling, “You’re a marvel. Is that the real Tabasco?”
“A 1914 cognac, sir, highly spoken of by the spirit merchants of Pall Mall. I trust you will find it to your tastes?”
I sipped at the proffered libation.
“In a situation like this, it might be said to hit the spot in no uncertain terms. You stand alone, Jeeves”
“Thank you, sir – I endeavour to give satisfaction”
And with those words borne to me on a sulphurous breeze, and the knowledge that Jeeves would know what to do next, I sank into a blissful and well-deserved slumber.
If there’s one thing these professional writer chappies – the sort that grin out from your morning paper and promise to teach you all the Secrets of the Craft – are hot on, it’s Pacing. Pacing, they are always telling you, is Key. Get your pacing wrong, and you are sunk, your audience reaching for its coats and telling the waiter they won’t be staying, and to put the starters on their slate.
Now normally, pacing is not something I worry myself too much with – the story just sort of flows out at its own speed, and I write The End at whatever seems a suitable point. But on this occasion, I think the nabobs of the quill and foolscap may be on the money, so I will hurry matters along somewhat.
The truth of the thing is that the next few days, as we hiked our way toward the mountain in the indeterminate distance, were not among the most thrilling of a life packed with incident and adventure. I am sure some writers would expect their readership to relive the march with them, in order to reach a fuller understanding of the central character’s motivations, and all that sort of rot, but I am of a more kindly disposition, so will spare the rod.
Suffice it to say that each day passed with little to enliven a weary tread – dust and ashes seemed to be the main decorative motif in the area, and trickling fountains or sinuous rills were not much in evidence. Even luncheon – usually the highlight of the Drones Club Walking Day – had been reduced to whatever water was left, and a sort of wafer arrangement which Jeeves had acquired somewhere on our travels, and of which he seemed to have an inexhaustible supply. It beat going hungry, of course, but only in a photo-finish after a Steward’s Enquiry.
During this trudge, Jeeves related to me what had happened during my post-arachnid spell in the land of Nod. Having temporarily removed Steggles from the picture – a wise move if ever there was one – he found that the brutish thing had wrapped me in a cocoon of webs, and left me in the roadway. He had thought his master dead, and while I have the highest respect for the man’s stiff upper lip, I fancy a tear or two might have been shed at the thought (to say nothing of that of facing the estate with my slate at the Drones Club bar). Recalling the task laid upon me, he took the family heirloom, and transferred it to a safe place somewhere about his person. Only after he had done this did he notice what I had taken to be the local gendarmerie, removing my body to their local lodgings. These were not in fact boys in blue, it transpired, but another detachment of the chaps we had met on the road, and just as ill-bred – having said which, they did at least confirm that I wasn’t dead, though likely to be so soon, once the hairy beast had left me to cure for a while.
My presence removed from the scene, Jeeves was left with the problem of what to do with the arachnid, which was now returning for a second pass. Though I find it difficult to credit of one of his temperament, apparently he inflicted a mortal wound upon it, using a Swiss Army Knife which he habitually carries. He seemed unwilling to talk about it very much, which I could understand, but acknowledged that the device for getting stones out of horses hooves had proved equally expedient in getting spiders guts out of their foul hides. It was not a pretty picture, and I was happy to leave it untinted further.
Partway down the path leading out of the spider’s lair, Jeeves had come across the tower in which I had been temporarily incarcerated. Finding few of our disreputable chums about, and still no sign of Steggles, he apparently announced his presence by signing a medley of Songs from the Shows. Having occasionally heard Jeeves’s attempts to harness the Euterpean and Terpsichorean Muses about the flat, I found this a difficult image to conjure up, but desperation brings out the best in a man, I suppose. Having dispatched any locals characters he encountered – I did not press him on this point, but I suspect a sharp look must have been employed – he found me, and returned me to consciousness and full possession of my faculties.
It was some days march before we reached the mountain, and whatever it was that I was expected to do. I became sure we were nearing the denouement – if that’s the word I’m looking for – because the ring had been growing steadily heavier. I could not begin to explain this, and suspected the sensation might in fact be a reaction to sulphur fumes, but nonetheless it suggested that we near nearing the final point. The mountain loomed up before us in the manner of a doorman at a club for which one’s membership has expired, and I felt my resolve begin to waver.
“Is this it, do you think, Jeeves? Does X mark the spot?”
Jeeves pointed up toward a stone doorway partway up the hill, from which smoke was issuing in a disconcerting manner.
“I would rather suggest, Sir, that we have indeed reached our destination. I suggest we commence the final climb”
I sighed heavily. “Well, lead on, Macbeth”
Jeeves coughed, but said nothing, and we began our ascent.
6. Death of a Family Heirloom
Alert readers may by this point be pursing their lips, pens poised over paper to enquire of the Editor as to the disappearance of Steggles. “This Wooster is a menace to literary society”, the resulting letters will howl, “he introduces characters willy-nilly into the story, then shoves them offstage again as it suits his whim, without any thought to the effect on the reading public!” They will continue on to express their further displeasure at Bertram’s all-round literary and general conduct, and to demand their seven shillings and threepence ha’penny annual subscription returned at the Editor’s expense. It is to them that I must briefly turn, before concluding my narrative.
The matter of Steggles had been causing me no little concern at this time. After being removed by Jeeves from the spidery tableau earlier, not a peep had been heard of his presence. Assuming Jeeves’s Viking strain had not come suddenly to the fore in a whirl of berserkering massacre, I assumed Steggles must be at large somewhere in the landscape, but had no idea where. An Etonian thwarted is a dangerous thing to leave lying around at the best of times – one with the low villainy and cunning of a Steggles was positively incendiary.
Be that as it may, the area remained free of his foul presence, as I struggled up to the doorway. Jeeves, unusually for him, had dropped behind, so I entered the mountain, and whatever lay beyond it, alone. A sort of avenue of stone projected out from the cave entrance, and beneath it, I could see lava and other fiery matters. I fancied what was called for was to deposit the ring into the lava – certainly, if anything more complex was demanded of Bertram, comprehensive instructions should have been posted somewhere. I took the thing out, and held it out over the flames, ready to do my duty for King, Country and Uncle Fangald. Then I had a funny turn.
The way I felt, thinking back, was rather similar to when Pongo Twistleton brought some cigars into the Drones which his Uncle had acquired for him somewhere in South America. I smoked one of them at the bar, and while the flavour was pleasingly mellow, with just a soupcon of cloves, the grey matter failed to relax or the vision to clear. Indeed, I fancied that Johnson the bartender had turned into a largeish sort of frog, and that Pongo himself had sprouted a number of extra limbs, to say nothing of a second head. The effect was short-lived, and my brain lost none of its customary sharpness as a result, but I politely declined Pongo’s offer of a second, and made my way home in something of a reverie. I had not experienced anything further of the kind until this moment, poised upon the brink.
The thing was, I couldn’t for the life of me see why I should toss the bally thing away. It was gold, after all, and while I was hardly short of funds, it was still worth a quid or two, and it seemed a waste to consign it to the roaring flames. Also, there was the matter of my ancestry – I had no idea which Wooster it was who had acquired the ring in the first place, but they must have had a reason to add it to the family estate, and was it respectful to dispose of it in this manner on an uncle’s whim? On the whole, I couldn’t see whose business it was except my own, and I was firmly of the opinion that the ring was worth hanging on to. After all, it might be a powerful talisman of Woosterishness down the ages, and belong in a museum. Maybe one day my heirs might look at it and fondly remember Bertram, and thank their lucky stars that it hadn’t been lost. So, what with one thing and another, I thought it best to turn away from the raging furnace, and to put the ring on my finger.
Steggles, it appears, had other ideas, for it was at this dramatic juncture that he chose to make his re-appearance. Screaming something inaudible, he ran straight toward me, a black look in his eyes that I recognised from brushes with Stilton Cheesewright, and sundry of the Capital’s Justices of the Peace. He launched himself at me in a manner I found less than comradely, and knocked me to the ground on the edge of the abyss.
“Steggles, Steggles”, I cried, “what is all this? Would you crave a boon, Steggles? I will help, if I may”.
But answer came there none, except a demented hiss, and I realised that all thoughts of the ties that bind Etonians together had left the Steggles cranium for more commodious accommodation. But then, he was a Cambridge man, so perhaps such behaviour should be excused.
What I had not expected at all, and which really took the proverbial giddy biscuit, was when he tried to eat my finger. I don’t know if you’ve ever been bitten by an Etonian – it’s not a common experience, I will admit – but we are taught to be thorough in all things, and once Steggles had taken a shine to the finger on which the ring was sitting, I knew I was in for a rather thin time of it. I swatted at whatever pieces of the appalling creature I could reach, but it was to no avail, and with a snickering howl of triumph, he extracted a sizeable lump of the fourth digit of my writing hand, and with it the ring. I wasn’t in the best frame of mind to assess his subsequent behaviour, but he did seem to exhibit a degree of glee at this act that I found unsporting, to say the least. If one has bitten off the finger of a sometime fellow member of the Drones, one should at least offer some humble contrition, not dance around in the manner of an Indian brave summoning a storm. I was, alas, too concerned with the pain to give vent to these feelings, and in any case the point was rendered moot when he missed his footing, gave a final gurgling scream, and plunged into the abyss. The lava closed over him, and as I was trying to think of a suitable epitaph for a man like Steggles, there was a colossal crash, and the mountain shook like a dog emerging from a river. The ring, I guessed, had finally met its end.
I was aware of a shimmering presence by my side, and looked up to see Jeeves proffering a gloved hand.
“If you would care to follow me, Sir. I fear our surroundings are a trifle unstable”.
“You know, Jeeves, I think you have a point. Lead, and I shall follow.”
“Very good, sir”.
The next thing I recall with any clarity was lying on a rock, somewhere above the tumultuous fray of boiling lava, as the world came to an end about our ears. This might have caused lesser hearts to blench, but Jeeves and I are both of sturdy English stock, and more than equal to the challenge. Jeeves bound my abused hand with bandages and a soothing unguent, then, miraculously, produced from the depths of the rough cloak he wore a small decanter, and a cut-glass goblet.
“Jeeves”, I said with feeling, “You’re a marvel. Is that the real Tabasco?”
“A 1914 cognac, sir, highly spoken of by the spirit merchants of Pall Mall. I trust you will find it to your tastes?”
I sipped at the proffered libation.
“In a situation like this, it might be said to hit the spot in no uncertain terms. You stand alone, Jeeves”
“Thank you, sir – I endeavour to give satisfaction”
And with those words borne to me on a sulphurous breeze, and the knowledge that Jeeves would know what to do next, I sank into a blissful and well-deserved slumber.
