A stuffy class-conscious gentleman's valet is transplanted to the rough uncivilized American northwest, where the rubes and social climbers are duly impressed with his manners and style. Will the American freedom rub off on the Englishman, or will the churlish Americans acquire some high-class polish? Witty social commentary a la P.G. Wodehouse's Jeeves and Wooster.
By : Harry Leon Wilson (1867 - 1939)
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At 6:30 in our Paris apartment I had finished the Honourable George, performing those final touches that make the difference between a man well turned out and a man merely dressed. In the main I was not dissatisfied. His dress waistcoats, it is true, no longer permit the inhalation of anything like a full breath, and his collars clasp too closely. (I have always held that a collar may provide quite ample room for the throat without sacrifice of smartness if the depth be at least two and one quarter inches.) And it is no secret to either the Honourable George or our intimates that I have never approved his fashion of beard, a reddish, enveloping, brushlike affair never nicely enough trimmed. I prefer, indeed, no beard at all, but he stubbornly refuses to shave, possessing a difficult chin. Still, I repeat, he was not nearly impossible as he now left my hands.
“Dining with the Americans,” he remarked, as I conveyed the hat, gloves, and stick to him in their proper order.
“Yes, sir,” I replied. “And might I suggest, sir, that your choice be a grilled undercut or something simple, bearing in mind the undoubted effects of shell-fish upon one’s complexion?” The hard truth is that after even a very little lobster the Honourable George has a way of coming out in spots. A single oyster patty, too, will often spot him quite all over.
“What cheek! Decide that for myself,” he retorted with a lame effort at dignity which he was unable to sustain. His eyes fell from mine. “Besides, I’m almost quite certain that the last time it was the melon. Wretched things, melons!”
Then, as if to divert me, he rather fussily refused the correct evening stick I had chosen for him and seized a knobby bit of thornwood suitable only for moor and upland work, and brazenly quite discarded the gloves.
“Feel a silly fool wearing gloves when there’s no reason!” he exclaimed pettishly.
“Quite so, sir,” I replied, freezing instantly.
“Now, don’t play the juggins,” he retorted. “Let me be comfortable. And I don’t mind telling you I stand to win a hundred quid this very evening.”
“I dare say,” I replied. The sum was more than needed, but I had cause to be thus cynical.
“From the American Johnny with the eyebrows,” he went on with a quite pathetic enthusiasm. “We’re to play their American game of poker—drawing poker as they call it. I’ve watched them play for near a fortnight. It’s beastly simple. One has only to know when to bluff.”
“A hundred pounds, yes, sir. And if one loses——”
He flashed me a look so deucedly queer that it fair chilled me.
“I fancy you’ll be even more interested than I if I lose,” he remarked in tones of a curious evenness that were somehow rather deadly. The words seemed pregnant with meaning, but before I could weigh them I heard him noisily descending the stairs. It was only then I recalled having noticed that he had not changed to his varnished boots, having still on his feet the doggish and battered pair he most favoured. It was a trick of his to evade me with them. I did for them each day all that human boot-cream could do, but they were things no sensitive gentleman would endure with evening dress. I was glad to reflect that doubtless only Americans would observe them.
So began the final hours of a 14th of July in Paris that must ever be memorable. My own birthday, it is also chosen by the French as one on which to celebrate with carnival some one of those regrettable events in their own distressing past.
To begin with, the day was marked first of all by the breezing in of his lordship the Earl of Brinstead, brother of the Honourable George, on his way to England from the Engadine. More peppery than usual had his lordship been, his grayish side-whiskers in angry upheaval and his inflamed words exploding quite all over the place, so that the Honourable George and I had both perceived it to be no time for admitting our recent financial reverse at the gaming tables of Ostend. On the contrary, we had gamely affirmed the last quarter’s allowance to be practically untouched—a desperate stand, indeed! But there was that in his lordship’s manner to urge us to it, though even so he appeared to be not more than half deceived.
“No good greening me!” he exploded to both of us. “Tell in a flash—gambling, or a woman—typing-girl, milliner, dancing person, what, what! Guilty faces, both of you. Know you too well. My word, what, what!”
Again we stoutly protested while his lordship on the hearthrug rocked in his boots and glared. The Honourable George gamely rattled some loose coin of the baser sort in his pockets and tried in return for a glare of innocence foully aspersed. I dare say he fell short of it. His histrionic gifts are but meagre.
“Fools, quite fools, both of you!” exploded his lordship anew. “And, make it worse, no longer young fools. Young and a fool, people make excuses. Say, ‘Fool? Yes, but so young!’ But old and a fool—not a word to say, what, what! Silly rot at forty.” He clutched his side-whiskers with frenzied hands. He seemed to comb them to a more bristling rage.
“Dare say you’ll both come croppers. Not surprise me. Silly old George, course, course! Hoped better of Ruggles, though. Ruggles different from old George. Got a brain. But can’t use it. Have old George wed to a charwoman presently. Hope she’ll be a worker. Need to be—support you both, what, what!”
I mean to say, he was coming it pretty thick, since he could not have forgotten that each time I had warned him so he could hasten to save his brother from distressing mésalliances. I refer to the affair with the typing-girl and to the later entanglement with a Brixton milliner encountered informally under the portico of a theatre in Charing Cross Road. But he was in no mood to concede that I had thus far shown a scrupulous care in these emergencies. Peppery he was, indeed. He gathered hat and stick, glaring indignantly at each of them and then at us.
“Greened me fair, haven’t you, about money? Quite so, quite so! Not hear from you then till next quarter. No telegraphing—no begging letters. Shouldn’t a bit know what to make of them. Plenty you got to last. Say so yourselves.” He laughed villainously here. “Morning,” said he, and was out.
“Old Nevil been annoyed by something,” said the Honourable George after a long silence. “Know the old boy too well. Always tell when he’s been annoyed. Rather wish he hadn’t been.”
So we had come to the night of this memorable day, and to the Honourable George’s departure on his mysterious words about the hundred pounds.
Left alone, I began to meditate profoundly. It was the closing of a day I had seen dawn with the keenest misgiving, having had reason to believe it might be fraught with significance if not disaster to myself. The year before a gypsy at Epsom had solemnly warned me that a great change would come into my life on or before my fortieth birthday. To this I might have paid less heed but for its disquieting confirmation on a later day at a psychic parlour in Edgware Road. Proceeding there in company with my eldest brother-in-law, a plate-layer and surfaceman on the Northern (he being uncertain about the Derby winner for that year), I was told by the person for a trifle of two shillings that I was soon to cross water and to meet many strange adventures. True, later events proved her to have been psychically unsound as to the Derby winner (so that my brother-in-law, who was out two pounds ten, thereby threatened to have an action against her); yet her reference to myself had confirmed the words of the gypsy; so it will be plain why I had been anxious the whole of this birthday...
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