Read The inimitable Jeeves for Free Online Page B

what?’
    ‘So I should be disposed to imagine, sir.’
    The situation was beginning to unfold before me.
    ‘I’ll go and give them back to her, eh? It’ll put me one up, what?’
    ‘Precisely, sir. And, if I may make the suggestion, I think it might be judicious to stress the fact that they were stolen by-.’
    ‘Great Scott! By the dashed girl she was hounding me on to marry; by Jove!’
    ‘Exactly, sir.’
    ‘Jeeves,’ I said, ‘this is going to be the biggest score off my jolly old relative that has ever occurred in the world’s history.’
    ‘It is not unlikely, sir.’
    ‘Keep her quiet for a bit, what? Make her stop snootering me for a while?’
    ‘It should have that effect, sir.’
    ‘Golly!’ I said, bounding for the door.

    Long before I reached Aunt Agatha’s lair I could tell that the hunt was up. Divers chappies in hotel uniform and not a few chambermaids of sorts were hanging about in the corridor, and through the panels I could hear a mixed assortment of voices, with Aunt Agatha’s topping the lot. I knocked but no one took any notice, so I trickled in. Among those present I noticed a chambermaid in hysterics, Aunt
    Agatha with her hair bristling and the whiskered cove who looked like a bandit, the hotel manager fellow.
    ‘Oh, hallo!’ I said. ‘Hallo-allo-allo!’
    Aunt Agatha shooshed me away. No welcoming smile for Bertram.
    ‘Don’t bother me now, Bertie,’ she snapped, looking at me as if I were more or less the last straw.
    ‘Something up?’
    ‘Yes, yes, yes! I’ve lost my pearls.’
    ‘Pearls? Pearls? Pearls?’ I said. ‘No, really. Dashed annoying. Where did you see them last?’
    ‘What does it matter where I saw them last? They have been stolen.’
    Here Wilfred the Whisker King, who seemed to have been taking a rest between rounds, stepped into the ring again and began to talk rapidly in French. Cut to the quick he seemed. The chambermaid whooped in the corner.
    ‘Sure you’ve looked everywhere?’ I said.
    ‘Of course I’ve looked everywhere.’
    ‘Well, you know, I’ve often lost a collar stud and -‘
    ‘Do try not to be so maddening, Bertie! I have enough to bear without your imbecilities. Oh, be quiet! Be quiet!’ she shouted in the sort of voice used by sergeant-majors and those who call the cattle home across the Sands of Dee. And such was the magnetism of her forceful personality that Wilfred subsided as if he had run into a wall. The chambermaid continued to go strong.
    ‘I say,’ I said, ‘I think there’s something the matter with this girl. Isn’t she crying or something? You may not have spotted it, but I’m rather quick at noticing things.’
    ‘She stole my pearls! I am convinced of it.’
    This started the whisker specialist off again, and in about a couple of minutes Aunt Agatha had reached the frozen grande-dame stage and was putting the last of the bandits through it in the voice she usually reserves for snubbing waiters in restaurants.
    ‘I tell you, my good man, for the hundredth time -‘
    ‘I say,’ I said, ‘don’t want to interrupt you and all that sort of thing, but these aren’t the little chaps by any chance, are they?’
    I pulled the pearls out of my pocket and held them up.
    ‘These look like pearls, what?’
    I don’t know when I’ve had a more juicy moment. It was one of those occasions about which I shall prattle to my grandchildren - if I ever have any, which at the moment of going to press seems more or less of a hundred-to-one shot. Aunt Agatha simply deflated before my eyes. It reminded me of when I once saw some chappies letting the gas out of a balloon.
    ‘Where - where - where -‘ she gurgled.
    ‘I got them from your friend, Miss Hemmingway.’
    Even now she didn’t get it.
    ‘From Miss Hemmingway. Miss Hemmingwayl But - but how did they come into her possession?’
    ‘How?’ I said. ‘Because she jolly well stole them. Pinched them! Swiped them! Because that’s how she makes her living, dash it