Jeeves and the Wedding Bells Read Online Free PDF Page A

suitcase, sir.’
    Whether it was the fear that Aunt Agatha might arrive early or for some other reason I couldn’t say, but the sole of the right brogue was no more than an inch from the floor of the two-seater when Stonehenge slid past to our right. Jeeves was giving me the lowdown on the novels of Thomas Hardy as weturned off and motored over Cranborne Chase into the depths of Dorsetshire.
    ‘Sounds a pretty gloomy sort of bird,’ I said, as he reached the big finale of Jude the Obscure .
    ‘His is undoubtedly not the sunniest of dispositions, sir. The poetry to which he has returned in later life has—’
    ‘Shall we leave the poetry for another day, Jeeves?’
    ‘As you wish, sir.’
    We broke our journey with a ham sandwich and a glass of ale in the small and silent village of Darston. Although we were his only customers, the innkeeper eyed us with a wariness that verged on the hostile. It can’t have been the appearance, since we were both wearing simple clothes to let us pass as holidaymakers at our destination. The beer took an age to trickle from the barrel and the ham seemed to have been cut from a porker ill-fated enough to have featured in the novels of T. Hardy.
    We did not linger, and with the help of the Gazeteer and a letter from the house agent, it was not long before Jeeves guided us into the village of Kingston St Giles and thence the gravelled area in front of Seaview Cottage. Here I let the faithful motor take a blow while Jeeves unloaded the bags.
    Seaview Cottage had a thatched roof and whitewashed walls. The accommodations were on the modest side, though adequate for our purposes. While Jeeves unpacked, I pottered round a pleasant patch of garden with some roses just coming out and a few rows of beans. As for a view of the sea, we appeared to be a good twenty miles inland, though I daresay a hawk with a strong telescope hovering a few feetabove the chimney pot might have made out a smudge of distant ocean.
    In the village, we had driven past a post office, a grocer and a butcher as well as a brace of inns, and I now dispatched Jeeves to send a telegram to Woody at Melbury Hall, advising of our arrival. As I may have mentioned, Woody, though brainy, is about as highly strung as Suzanne Lenglen’s tennis racquet. I didn’t want him letting off a startled, ‘Blow me down, it’s Bertie Wooster!’ if he bumped into me in lane or meadow. I also instructed Jeeves to bring in some supplies and see what either of the public houses might provide by way of dinner.
    Then I took a deckchair into the garden, removed the tie, rolled up the sleeves and opened By Pullman to Peking , by Rupert Venables, which I had had sent round from the bookshop before we left. I had been surprised to find that it was signed by the author on the title page, but Jeeves told me it was common for authors to scribble in as many copies as they could, since this meant the bookshop could not return them unsold to the publisher.
    It knocked me back a bit. I suppose I had expected something of a yarn or an adventure, but this Venables recounted his journey from first idea, to booking office, to tram, to terminus, in the same tone. He reminded me of someone – though for a moment I struggled to remember who. It was on page thirty-four, in the boat train from Victoria, in which Venables described each of the passengers in his compartment, that it came to me: it was ‘Stodgy’ Stoddard, the club bore at the Drones, around whom there was always a blast area whereother lunchers had evacuated the vicinity. ‘The next person to come into the compartment, was a nondescript middle-aged man of oriental or perhaps Eurasian descent,’ wrote Venables; but it wasn’t worth finding out about this chap because it turned out that after Boulogne he slung his hook and disappeared.
    After an hour or so, I put down the book, not without a certain relief, I admit, though also with a fair degree of puzzlement. How on earth had Georgiana allowed