JEEVES GRIEVES

New Zealand Listener, Volume 7, Issue 162, 31 July 1942, Page 11

JEEVES GRIEVES

Fg imaginary conversation by some of po Pry ‘odehouse’s imaginary characters a -_ behavour of their is taken from "Time". iit Si in the Drones’ Club was thickly post-prandial, a pleasant miasma of tobacco port, fizz water spashing into amber whisky, 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 dinnerOld 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." (Wodehousian for the long green, mazuma, dough, cash.) "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 had signed on the jolly old dotted line with a\‘Nazi film company for two pictures, and that that frightful cad Hitler is giving him special ‘courtesy marks’ for good behaviour? 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 name. Well, anyhow, some ghastly nonsense about Fascism not mattering so long as it let’s 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 over-ripe. 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 bad. Y’know," said Bertie in an awed, incredulous tone, "I believe the pocr cld blighter was squiffed."