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[tootsiemuppet.livejournal.com]

When I wrote my quotes from Much Obliged, Jeeves in my journal, anima_mecanique replied with:

"La, I was thinking of doing this for Code of the Woosters, mainly so *I* would remember the quotes, but gah! I'm giggling like a madwoman right now."

So *finally* here is my selection of citations.


THE CODE OF THE WOOSTERS

An Introduction by Alexander Colburn

P.G. Wodehouse, when asked what stimulated his creative juices, replied laconically, “Oh, I don’t know. I just sit down at the typewriter and curse a bit.” Typical Wodehouse: an impenetrable, offhanded joviality; self-deprecation that leaves the question perched foolishly on one leg.

Of the two, Wooster is by far the more interesting. He is a character. Jeeves, to the end of his days, remains a type – the deus ex machina who saves the day when all seems lost, the great artificer who ties up the loose ends and who rescues Bertie from his repeated follies.

Bertie would not dream of clinching a proposal with a demand.

It’s as though one suddenly found Bonsola or another of those Jacobean adventurers dressed up as a butler and handing round cucumber sandwiches.

Like Homer, he knew that relaxation meant inattention, sleep or disconsolate grumblings that bards are not what they used to be in the old days.

If this kind of stuff won’t cause curvature to your naso-labials, nothing will.

… unreachable by almost anything but laughter itself.


§1

His whole attitude recalled irresistibly to mind that of some assiduous hound who will persist in laying a dead rat on the drawing room carpet, though repeatedly apprised by word and gesture that the market for same is sluggish or even nonexistent.
“Jeeves,” I said, “this nuisance must now cease.”
“Travel is highly educational, sir.”
“I can’t do with any more education. I was full up years ago.”

I could see that if not actually disgruntled, he was far from being gruntled.

“Slice him where you like, a hellhound is always a hellhound.”

“I can’t shake my head, not today.”
She gazed at me with a censorious waggle of the right eyebrow.
“Oh, so that’s how it is? Well, if your loathsome excesses have left you incapable of headshaking, you can at least curl your lip.”

A confirmed recluse you would have called him, if you had happened to know the word, and you would have been right.

I call her a ghastly girl because she was a ghastly girl.

I remember her telling me once that rabbits were gnomes in attendance on the Fairy Queen and that the stars were God’s daisy chain. Perfect rot, of course. They’re nothing of the sort.

I mean to say, if a girl has got it into her nut that a fellow loves her, and comes to tell him that she is returning her fiancé to store and is now prepared to sign up with him, what can a chap do?
Series addition: you have to be civil.

“Oh, and give this to Jeeves, when you see him. It’s the Husband’s Corner article. It’s full of deep stuff about braid on the side of men’s dress trousers, and I’d like him to vet it. For all I know, it may be full of Red propaganda.”

Scratch Bertram Wooster, I often say, and you find a Boy Scout.

It was old Pop Bassett in person. Himself. Not a picture.

“Oh, yes?” said the Dictator.
Granted that it wasn’t quite “Oh, yeah?” I still didn’t like the way he spoke.

What had caused me to take up the [umbrella] that had been leaning against a seventeenth-century chair, I cannot say, unless it was the primeval instinct which makes a man without an umbrella reach out for the nearest one in sight, like a flower groping toward the sun.

Being a magistrate makes you love the idea of calling policemen. It’s like a tiger tasting blood.

“Oh thou of unshuffled features and agreeable disposition,” I said, for one likes to be civil.

“Oh, tut, tut, tut!” I said. “Oh, dear, dear, dear! Oh, no, no, no, no, no!”

You can’t combine tripping over cats with languid sauntering.

A voice shouted “Stop!” but of course, I didn’t. Stop, I mean to say! Of all the damn silly ideas.


§2

mens sana in corpore whatnot.

Why, at our private school, where I had first met him, he had been known as “Fathead”, and that was in competition with fellows like Bingo Little, Freddie Widgeon and myself.

What is to be done? What has happened? Why serious rift? How do you mean wedding broken off? Why dickens? What have you been doing to the girl?

“Eggs! Kippers! What I want is a brandy and soda.”

“May green flies attack his roses. May his cook get tight on the night of the big dinner party. May all his hens get the staggers.”
“Does he keep hens?” I said, putting a point.
“May his cistern start leaking, and may white ants, if there are any in England, gnaw away at the foundations of Totleigh Towers.”

Bicarbonate of soda, my foot!

It was a sad story, of course, and one that bore out what I had so often felt about Pop Bassett – to wit, that a magistrate who could nick a fellow for five pounds, when a mere reprimand would more than have met the case, was capable of anything.

“You would just sit tight and say ‘Well, well!’ and do nothing?”
I weighed this.
“Possibly not ‘Well, well!’ I concede that the situation is one that calls for the strongest comment. But I wouldn’t do anything.”

“Aunt Dahlia, this is blackmail!”
“Yes, isn’t it,” she said, and beetled off.

“I have been in some tough spots in my life but this one wins the mottled oyster.”

The man was being discreet and this was no time for discretion.

“You agree with me that the situation is a lulu?”
“Certainly a somewhat sharp crisis in your affairs would appear to have precipitated, sir.”
I drove on, brooding.
“If I had to live my life again, Jeeves, I would start it as an orphan without any aunts. Don’t they put aunts in Turkey in sacks and drop them in the Bosphorus?”
“Odalisques, sir, I understand. Not aunts.”
“Well, why not aunts? Look at the trouble they cause in the world. I tell you, Jeeves, and you may quote me as saying this: Behind every poor, innocent harmless blighter who is going down for the third time in the soup you will find, if you look carefully enough, the aunt who pushed him into it.”

“You remember that fellow you’ve mentioned to me once or twice, who let something wait upon something? You know who I mean – the cat chap.”

Jeeves does not often smile, but now a distinct simper had begun to wreathe his lips.
“A laughable misunderstanding, sir.”
“Laughable, Jeeves?”
He saw that his mirth had been ill timed. He reassembled the features, ironing out the smile.
“I beg your pardon, sir. I should have said ‘disturbing.’”

Well, you can see that for yourself, I mean to say. I mean, imagine how some unfortunate master criminal would feel, on the coming down to do a murder at the Old Grangen if he found that not only was Sherlock Holmes putting in the week end there, but Hercule Poirot, as well.

Totleigh Towers might be a place where man was vile, but undoubtedly every prospect pleased.


§3

Magistrates’ natures soon get warped. He kept interrupting and asking questions, and cocking an eye at me as he asked them. You know what I mean – questions beginning with “Just one moment—“ and “You say—“ and “Then you are asking us to believe—“ Offensive, very.

She was standing by the barometer, which, if it had an ounce of sense in its head, would have been pointing to “Stormy” instead of “Set Fair.”

“Oh, Bertie, you remind me of Rudel.”
The name was new to me.
“Rudel?”
“The Seigneur Geoffrey Rudel, Prince of Blaye-en-Saintonge.”
I shook my head.
“Never met him, I’m afraid. Pal of yours?”
“He lived in the Middle Ages. He was a great poet. And he fell in love with the wife of the Lord of Tripoli.”
“I stirred uneasily. I hoped she was going to keep it clean.
“For years he loved her, and at last he could resist no longer. He took ship to Tripoli, and his servants carried him ashore.”
“Not feeling so good?” I said, groping. “Rough crossing?”
“He was dying. Of love.”
“Oh, ah.”
“They bore him into the Lady Mélisande’s presence and he had just strength enough to reach out and touch her hand. Then he died.”
She paused, and heaved a sigh that seemed to come straight from the cami-knickers. A silence ensued.
“Terrific,” I said, feeling I had to say something, though personally I didn’t think the story a patch on the one about the travelling salesman and the farmer’s daughter. Different, of course, if one had known the chap.

She looked at me like someone who has just solved the crossword puzzle with a shrewd “Emu” in the top right-hand corner.

“Have you not felt sometimes in the past, Bertie, that, if Augustus had a fault, it was a tendency to be a little timid?”
I saw what she meant.
“Oh, ah, yes, of course, definitely.” I remembered something Jeeves had once called Gussie. “A sensitive plant, what?”
“Exactly. You know your Shelley, Bertie.”
“Oh, am I?”

Even across the room one could see that, when it came to self-confidence, Mussolini could have taken his correspondence course.

I was astounded at my keenness of perception. The moment I had set eyes on Spode, if you remember, I had said to myself “What ho! A Dictator,” and a Dictator he had proved to be. I couldn’t have made a better shot if I had been one of those detectives who see a chap walking along the street and deduce that he is a retired manufacturer of poppet valves named Robinson with rheumatism in one arm, living at Clapham.
“Well, I’m dashed! I thought he was something of that sort. That chin… those eyes… And, for the matter of that, that moustache.”

“Quite possibly. However, never mind about that. That is not the point.”
“No, I know. But it’s interesting.”
“No, it isn’t.”
“Perhaps you’re right.”

“But what is the love life of newts, if you boil it right down? Didn’t you tell me once that they just wagged their tails at one another in the mating season?”
“Quite correct.”
I shrugged my shoulders.
“Well, all right, if they like it. But it’s not my idea of molten passion.”

“He told me that you and he were starting almost immediately on one of those round-the-world cruises.”
“Oh no, that’s all off. I didn’t like the scheme.”
“Does Jeeves say it’s all off?”
“No, but I do.”
“Oh?”
[Gussie] looked at me rather oddly, and I thought he was going to say something more on the subject. But he only gave a rummy sort of short laugh and resumed his narrative.
[I love how everyone but Bertie himself knows that Jeeves has got him whipped]

§4

I don’t know if you have had the same experience, but a thing I have found in life is that from time to time, as you job along, there occur moments which you are able to recognise immediately with the naked eye as high spots. Something tells you that they are going to remain etched, if etched is the word I want, for ever on the memory and will come back to you at intervals down the years, as you are dropping off to sleep, banishing that drowsy feeling and causing you to leap on the pillow like a gaffed salmon.

All right up to the neck, but from there on pure concrete – that was Augustus Fink-Nottle.

“I never thought of that!”
“Start now.”
“Oh, my gosh!”
“Yes.”
“Oh, my golly!”
“Quite.”
“Oh, my sainted aunt!”
“Absolutely.”

“Still, I wouldn’t worry about that, old man,” I said, pointing out the bright side, “because long before it happened Spode would have broken your neck.”

I uttered an exclamash.
“Reach for the handkerchief!”

One moment, he was with us, all merry and bright; the next he was in a ditch, a sort of macédoine of arms and legs and wheels, with the terrier standing on the edge, looking down at him with that rather offensive expression of virtuous smugness which I have often noticed on the faces of Aberdeen terriers in their clashes with humanity.

I might have said to myself: If Scotties come, can Stiffy be far behind?

Suavity is what you need on these occasions. You can’t beat suavity.

“Don’t be an ass, Oates. You can’t expect a dog to pass up a policeman on a bicycle. It isn’t human nature.”

Stiffy stood for a moment looking after him a bit yearningly, like a girl who wished that she had half a brick handy.

I flung the hands heavenwards and uttered a joyful yowl. The dog Bartholomew gave me an unpleasant look and said something under his breath in Gaelic, but I ignored him.

You know, the more I see of women, the more I think there ought to be a law. Something has got to be done about this sex, or the whole fabric of society will collapse, and then what silly asses we shall all look.

The evening, I remember, was one of perfect tranquillity, featuring a sort of serene peace. Which just shows you.

“You’ve got to face it. Curates are not so hot.”

A man thinks he’s being chilled steel – or adamant, if you prefer the expression – and suddenly the mists clear away and he finds that he has been allowed a girl to talk him into something frightful. Samson had the same experience with Delilah.

We Woosters are pretty quick. I don’t suppose it was more than a couple of minutes before I figured out what she meant.

In other words, after being blackmailed by an aunt at breakfast, I was now being blackmailed by a female crony before dinner. Pretty good going even for this lax post-War world.

I suppose even Dictators have their chummy moments, when they put their feet up and relax with the boys.

“Stop saying ‘Oh yes?’ you miserable worm and listen to me?”
Many chaps might have resented this tone. I did myself, as a matter of fact. But you know how it is. There are some fellows you are right on your toes to tick off when they call you a miserable worm, others not quite so much.


§5

“There are moments, Jeeves, when one asks oneself, ‘Do trousers matter?’”
“The mood will pass, sir.”

‘She was fully aware that she was doing something which even by female standards was raw, but she didn’t care. The whole fact of the matter is that all this modern emancipation of women has resulted in them getting it up their noses and not giving a damn what they do. It was not like this in Queen Victoria’s day. The Prince Consort would have had a word to say about a girl like Stiffy, what?”

“Courage, Gussie! Think of Archimedes.”
“Why?”
“He was killed by a common soldier.”
“What of it?”
“Well, it can’t have been pleasant for him, but I have no doubt he passed out smiling.”

I checked him sharply. There are limits, and we Woosters recognise them.
“Gussie, are you suggesting that I prod Stiffy’s legs?”
“Yes.”
“Well, I’m not going to.”
“Why not?”
“We need not delve into my reasons,” I said, stiffly. “Suffice it to say that the shot is not on board.

“Mrs. Travers,” he announced formally.

An “Oh, golly!” broke from my lips. I had known, of course, hearing that formal announcement, that she was coming, but so does a poor blighter taking a stroll and looking up and seeing a chap in an aeroplane dropping a bomb on his head know that that is coming, but it doesn’t make it any better when it arrives.

“What? Incredulous!”
“Incredible, sir.”
“Thank you, Jeeves. Incredible!”

“The contingency of Mrs Spenser Gregson obtaining access to the club book is a remote one.”
“I daresay. But recent events under this very roof will have shown you how women do obtain access to books.”


§6

They put in the time for the most part making bread pills and, as far as I was able to ascertain, didn’t exchange a word from start to finish. Oh, yes, once – when he asked her to pass the salt, and she passed him the pepper, and he said “I meant the salt,” and she said “Oh, really?” and passed the mustard.

“Because he is a butterfly who toys with women’s hearts and throws them away like soiled gloves.”
“Right ho,” I hadn’t a notion that that was what butterflies did. Most interesting.

“Never mind about beds and Dictators.”

“No, my heart is broken, my future is blank, and there is nothing to be done but accept the fact and start knotting sheets. Let’s get at it.”

“You have disappointed me.”
“You have disappointed me. I thought you had guts.”
“I have, and I don’t want Roderick Spode fooling about with them.”


§7

I smote the trouser leg emotionally.

I practiced for a bit. I walked up to the chest of drawers with my hands in my pockets and said, “Spode, I know all about Eulalie.” I tried again, waggling my finger this time. I then had a go with folded arms, and I must say it still didn’t sound too convincing.
However, I told myself that Jeeves always knew.

He gave me a hard stare. The eyes behind the spectacles were cold. He looked like an annoyed turbot.

“Ho!” he said.
Well, of course, I was not going to stand any rot like that. This habit of his of going round the place saying “Ha!” was one that had to be checked, and checked promptly.

“Really, one gets about as much privacy in this house as a strip-tease dancer.”

He was staring incredulously, as one bitten by a rabbit.

“The trouble with you, Spode, is that just because you have succeeded in inducing a handful of half-wits to disfigure the London scene by going about in black shorts, you think you’re someone. You hear them shouting ‘Heil, Spode!’ and you imagine that it is the Voice of the People. That is where you make your bloomer. What the Voice of the People is saying is, ‘look at that frightful ass Spode swanking about in footer bags! Did you ever in your puff see such a perfect perisher?”

I ever there was a fellow who needed hitting him with oil paintings, that fellow was Roderick Spode.

But the whole point about we Woosters, as I have had occasion to remark before, is that they are not lesser men. They think quickly, and they act quickly. Napoleon was the same.

One moment the mind’s blank; the next, the fount of memory spouting like nobody’s business. It often happens that way.

Finally, he spoke. And when he did so, it was the nearest thing to a cooing dove I have ever heard – and an exceptionally mild-mannered dove, at that.

“Oh?” he said.
“Ah,” I replied, and there was silence again for a moment.

“Well, I’ll be—“
Here she paused – fortunately, perhaps, for she is a woman who, when strongly moved, sometimes has a tendency to forget that she is no longer in the hunting field, and the verb, had she given it utterance, might have proved bit too fruity for mixed company.

“Good old blackmail! You can’t beat it. I’ve always said so and I always shall. It works like magic in an emergency, Bertie.”

Think feudally, Jeeves.


§8

“I assure you, Jeeves. You could wish no better weapon than a sheet.”

“Are you afraid of the little dog, Jeeves?”
He corrected me respectfully, giving it as his opinion that the undersigned was not a tiny little dog, but well above the average in muscular development. In particular, he drew my attention to the animal’s teeth.
I reassured him:
“I think that you would find that if you were to make a sudden spring, his teeth would not enter into the matter. You could leap onto the bed, snatch up a sheet, roll him up in it before he knew what was happening, and there we would be.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Well, are you going to make a sudden spring?”
“No, sir.”

A rather stiff silence ensued, during which the dog Bartholomew continued to gaze at me unwinkingly, and once more I found myself noticing –and resenting—the superior, sanctimonious expression on his face. Nothing can ever render the expression of being trees on top of a chest of drawers by an Aberdeen terrier pleasant, but it seemed to me that the least you can expect on such an occasion is that the animal will meet you halfway and not drop salt into the wound by looking at you as if he were asking if you were saved.

“Would it be asking too much of you to attach a stout lead to his collar, thus making the world safe for democracy?”

He looked like a clerical beet root.

“I hope,” I said, “that you remembered to give the forward shove before the upward lift?”
“It wasn’t necessary. The helmet was not on his head. He had taken it off and put it on the ground, and I just crept up and grabbed it.”
I started, pursing the lips a bit.
“Not quite playing the game, Stinker.”
“Yes, it was,” said Stiffy, with a good deal of warmth. “I call it very clever of him.”
I could not recede from my position. At the Drones, we hold strong views on these things.
“There is a right was and a wrong was of pinching policemen’s helmets,” I said firmly.

She is a female, and the tendency of females to be unable to distinguish between right and wrong is notorious.

[After a long rant:]
I paused, much moved. A bit out of breath, too.

“Less of the ‘Bertie, darling.’ ‘Bertie, darling,’ forsooth! A nice time to start ‘Bertie, darling’-ing.”

“Oomp… Oomp…”
“But, Stiffy, old girl, be reasonable.”

“Well, you certainly are the most wonderful woolly baa-lamb that ever stepped.”
“Thank you, miss.”

I don’t mind people talking rot in my presence, but it must not be utter rot.


§9

“Sort of makes you say to yourself, ‘Quis custodiet ipsos custodes’, what?”
“I beg your pardon?”
“Latin joke,” I explained. “Quis – who –custodiet—shall guard—ipsos custodies—the guards themselves? Rather funny, I mean to say,” I proceeded, making it clear to the meanest intelligence, “a chap who’s supposed to stop chaps from pinching things from chaps having a chap come along and pinch something from him.”

“You will not be losing a niece. You will be gaining a nephew.”
“But I don’t want a nephew, damn it!”
Well, there was that, of course.

She wiggled from base to apex with girlish enthusiasm, but there was no girlish enthusiasm in old Bassett’s demeanour. Well, there wouldn’t be, of course, what I mean is there wasn’t.

“Bertie, could one kiss Jeeves?”
“Certainly not.”
“Shall I kiss you?”
“No, thank you.”

Everyone, I imagine, has read stories in which things turned black and swam before people. As I heard these words, Stiffy turned black and swam before me. It was as if I had been looking at a flickering Negress.


§10

I could still see Pop Bassett’s face when he had thought that he was going to draw me for a nephew. It would be a bit thick, I felt, while he was still quivering to the roots of the soul at the recollection of that hairbreadth escape, to tell him I was about to become his son in law. I was not fond of Pop Bassett, but one has one’s humane instincts.

§11

I don’t know what the Mona Lisa would have done in my place. Probably just what I did.
“Jeeves,” I said, “brandy!”

“I broke the tank. The tank in my bedroom. The glass tank I keep my newts in. I broke the glass tank in my bedroom, and the bath was the only place to lodge the newts. The basin wasn’t large enough. Newts need elbow room. So I put them in the bath. Because I had broken the tank. The glass tank in my bedroom. The glass tank I keep my…”

You know what collectors are like. Practically potty, every one of them.

Just the sort of chap who would automatically go leaping into raspberry bushes if you told him there were girls there.

“You wouldn’t care to do it for me, Bertie?”
“No, I would not.”
“Many fellows would, to help an old school friend.”
“Many fellows are mugs.”
“Have you forgotten those days at the dear old school?”
“Yes.”


§12

Aunt Dahlia snorted again, like one giving an encore in response to a popular demand.

I don’t think I have ever assisted at a ceremony which gave such universal pleasure to all concerned. The sheet didn’t split, which pleased Gussie. Nobody came to interrupt us, which pleased me. And when I dropped the suitcase, it hit Gussie on the head, which delighted Autn Dahlia.


§13

“Thank you, Bertie, darling. I knew you would be sweet about it. I can’t tell you how grateful I am, and how much I admire you. You remind me of Carter Paterson… no, that’s not it… Nick Carter… no, not Nick Carter… Who does Mr Wooster remind me of, Jeeves?
“Sidney Carton, Miss.”

“Who is Jeeves?”
“Don’t you know Jeeves? This is Jeeves. Jeeves… Sir Watkyn Bassett.”
“And who may you be, my man?”
“That’s exactly what he is – my man. May I say my right-hand man?”
“Thank you, sir.”
“Not at all, Jeeves. Well-earned tribute.”


§14

It was not so very long since she had been speaking in high terms of blackmail and giving it her hearty approval, but if you want to derive real satisfaction from blackmail, you have to be at the right end of it. Catching it coming, as it were, instead of going, this woman was suffering.

“Bassett, we defy you.”

He opened the door. “Here, you!”
It was a most improper way of addressing, Jeeves.

I wouldn’t say he smiled – he practically never does – but a muscle abaft the mouth did seem to quiver slightly for an instant.

“An odd thing, life, Jeeves.”
“Very odd, sir.”

“This is the end of a perfect day, Jeeves. What’s that thing of yours about larks?”
“Sir?”
“And, I rather think, snails.”
“Oh yes, sir. ‘The year’s at the spring, the day’s at the morn, morning’s at seven, the hillside’s dew-pearled—“
“But the larks, Jeeves? The nails? I’m pretty sure larks and snails entered into it.”
“I am coming to the larks and snails, sir. The lark’s on the wing, the snail’s on the thorn.”
“Now you’re talking. And the tab line?”
“God’s in His heaven, all’s right with the world.”

“You can’t be a successful Dictator and design women’s underclothing.”
“No, sir.”
“One or the other. Not both.”
“Precisely, sir.”

And presently the eyes closed, the muscles relaxed, the breathing became soft and regular, and sleep which does something which has slipped my mind to the something sleeve of care poured over me in a healing wave.

Comments

[anima-mecanique.livejournal.com]

A most admirable display of quote finding. *bows* Absolutely nothing to add to that.

"Whipped" is decidedly the word. Jeeves always gets his way. It's lucky for Bertie that he seems to be right most of the time...

[tootsiemuppet.livejournal.com]

All the time.

I wonder if there ever was a time when Jeeves did anything that was short of perfection. Seems a bit inconceivable.