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Escape: A "Jeeves" Fan-Fic


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A/N: My first re-posting from AO3-- originally posted in a much worse form on DeviantArt.

My dear imaginary audience (for imaginary you must be, unless you’re B. Wooster himself,) I imagine that you’re of the intelligent variety. You don’t allow yourself to be duped. You aren’t told by chortling chums that it’s raining sausages and head out into the streets with your finest china. “Peter,” you say, if your c. c.’s name is Peter, “Peter, you jest. Nothing so absurd has happened since the days of Exodus. You’re telling a fib, my good man, and I suggest that you cease at once.” You’d be right to take a dismissive attitude, and you would no doubt be commended for it.

You couldn’t be faulted for assuming the same attitude towards this scrap of prose. You’d be perfectly right to dismiss the improbable happenings and shocking revelations herein, for they are decently improbable and fairly shocking. You’d be right until your humble author informed you that this is an account torn directly from his experience, and that it is absolutely, brilliantly, mortifyingly true. Maybe a description has erred here or there, but the general contents are factual as Bertram Wilberforce knows how to present them. They could scarcely have been vivid enough for him to ruin several sets of sheets and pajamas and perfectly good baths in their honor if they were pure fiction!

The starting gun sounded, as it so often does, at the threat of matrimony. I burst into my Berkeley Mansions abode around noontime, crying out for Jeeves at such a pitch and volume that I could have impressed my Aunt Dahlia in her hunting days. A disaster had occurred. Madeleine Bassett had once again deigned to drift down from her cloud of perfumed romance and had been spotted roving the land in search of her specific dream rabbit. I had it from the lads at the Drones that she was headed Wooster-ward, and I knew that the only solution was to throw her off the scent with distance. Two or three hours by car, at least, to have her tiff with the Fink-Nottle poop repaired and those huge fish-eyes trained on him or some other poor soul again.

“Jeeves!” I called, plucking my driving cap from its rack and hurling myself back into the threshold. “We’ve got to leave, now.  Madeline Bassett’s been reported to have caught onto my blood like a different breed of her sort, if you take my meaning. We must hie us to safer locales.”

The above-referenced paragon of manservants appeared in the midst of my babbling explanation, and, for once, his mere presence didn’t manage to relieve my anxiety. He had been in the kitchen polishing shoes when I made my entrance, if I were to surmise by the slightly miffed expression (i.e., the slightest quirk of the left eyebrow,) and the black Oxford, half-mirror finished, taking up residence in his hand. Jeeves considered my breathless form for a moment before replying coolly:

“Of course, sir. I will be with you in a moment. There are some things I’d like to fetch for the journey.” Needless to say, I was impatiently incensed by this talk of “things.” Couldn’t he sense that this was a matter of direst urgency?

“This is no time for things, Jeeves; we’ve got to go this minute!”

“Very good, sir.” My insistence moved him this time, and with what I think may have been a sigh (unless it was the whisper of a neglected shoe being placed delicately by the kitchen door,) my man nodded and joined me at the threshold. He followed a step or two behind me down the stairs and out the front door, freshly gloved and bowler-hatted and without a whit of a changed air about him. Nothing whatever could have indicated his being somehow ruffled by our impromptu journey. I would argue, lest the pride of the Woosters should suffer a blow, that I couldn’t have anticipated the events of the afternoon unless I’d been a veritable C. A. Dupin. Jeeves’ face was then as it always was: sculpted and strong and inscrutable as a chunk of marble.

As always in times of great stress, when I believe my valet’s serener style of driving won’t do, I insisted upon taking the wheel, and drove as hastily as one could through London’s midday traffic. Once we’d reached the outskirts of the city and could begin really stretching the car’s legs, Jeeves turned to me and spoke. Courtesy dictated a glance at him; I saw him clutching the rim of his bowler hat with a black-gloved hand to keep it from flying off into the ether. The hat, that is, not the hand.

“Sir,” he began, voice raised a bit over the hearty pounding of pistons, “where is it we are going, precisely, to evade Miss Bassett?” I smiled at the road, reveling a tad in the cunning of my plan.

“The young master’s outdone himself this time, Jeeves! Not only is this scheme suitable for escaping La Bassett, but it’s perfectly revel—relen—”

“Relevant, sir?”

“That’s the chappie! It’s perfectly relevant to our interests. There’s this place, you see, a summer house that Bingo’s just got his mitts on and is looking to rent. He recommended it to me just last weekend. Supposedly, the place is absolutely brimming with atmosphere. He’s going to show us around when we get there. Or so he says. I’ve some trouble believing that he’ll be ready to show at any moment, what with ‘June’ or ‘Julia’ or whoever it is cluttering up his brain these days….  Anyhow, we should be arriving in a couple of hours, give or take.”

Jeeves coughed into his fist—a little louder than the gentle bleat of a sheep on a distant hillock—and joined me in gazing at the road without another word.

A good forty-five minutes or so passed in near-silence. As my desperation for departure from the metrop. began to dissipate, I became increasingly aware of Jeeves’ unusual behavior. The quiet between us led me to sneaking peeks at him, and what I observed made said peeks increase in frequency as our journey wore on: Jeeves seemed restless. I’d never known him to move much during our travels before. Typically, he would settle in and we would have a matey conversation, or else he would gaze at the countryside or pick up an improving book. Yet on this occasion, he seemed unable to settle (if the frequent stirring of limbs was to be believed) and had not a thing to say. Though we were flying down the road at a decent clip, Jeeves’ hand left its place securing old size-fourteen and clutched his knee instead. I couldn’t help but notice how said h. convulsed whenever we hit a rough patch in the road, together with a twinge of the noble brow.

I could get along without pointing out these peculiar acts at first; however, when Jeeves gave a decided (if small and dignified in its Jeevesian way) groan, and the tips of his fingers rose to his waistcoat just over his midriff, I was troubled enough to speak up. We had just encountered a particularly jarring bump, and, though it shook the tailbone a little, groaning seemed unnecessary, even to one as vocal as B. Wooster.

“I say, Jeeves, are you feeling all right?” Naturally, one asks such questions by way of expressing concern. But I think that something in mine insulted Jeeves, for his response was to sit up even more erect and reply with a sort of clipped terseness I’d never heard him employ before.

“Thank you, yes, sir. I am experiencing some slight vertebral pain, but, otherwise, I am well. The discomfort should pass with time.”

I didn’t quite have an answer to that—Jeeves had made it clear that he had no desire to discuss his affliction—but I made an effort to keep the conversation flowing anyhow. Not on the topic of aching spines, naturally, but on lighter, diverting things. The sorts of things I would normally have an amiable chat with my valet about: my latest golfing exploits, Boko and Nobbie’s next visit to London, and, stretching myself to my intellectual limits, the release of Spinoza’s next and finest. All received curt “yes, sir”-s and “very good, sir”-s in return, without a drop of commentary or insight. When even the subject of purple socks was met with near-apathy, I decided to give it up as a bad job and allowed this new “quiet” motif to settle between us.

Despite his suggestion that time would heal all, Jeeves’ condition visibly deteriorated over the next hour. He began to flush bright red about the ears and cheeks, and doffed his hat, revealing a pale and slightly shiny forehead. Jeeves didn’t just remove the chapeau, but held it with lap with both hands and began tapping it rhythmically. I had to work to disguise my shock. Prior to this incident, I’d believed valets as a species incapable of fidgeting.

But fidget Jeeves did, minutely at first, and increasing steadily in intensity as time strolled by. The restlessness that had been curtailed when I’d first made inquiry into Jeeves’ condition returned with renewed vigor. There came a point at which he was hardly sitting at all, twisted instead into a curious position with his back arched and his legs pressed firmly together, crossed at the ankles. (“The things one has to do for one’s spine,” I mused.) The sighs, though very quiet, were falling thick and fast, and, when I chanced to look at his face, the baby blues appeared to dance around the open, hilly landscape as if seeking… something.

Since I’d already questioned him once, and hadn’t exactly been gifted with a chummy response, I refrained from giving tongue to any further comment. But Jeeves’ decidedly rummy way—which, I exaggerate not, yielded a whimper from him as he squeezed his eyes shut and pressed one foot on top of the other—definitely tested the Empathy clause of the Code of the Woosters. In spite of the Code, I was trapped in silence. I was sure that if I prodded him again, Jeeves would only become shorter with the young master. No doubt, if I followed that path, this would all end with his refusal to let me so much as utter the word “hospital.”

Thankfully, I didn’t have to suffer very long before Jeeves spoke. I say that he “spoke;” I should say instead that he gasped some words at me through an obviously rigid larynx.

“Sir... how long shall it be until we arrive, now?” I peeped sideways at my man—whose face had come over a sincerely sickly combination of white and bright red since last I looked at him—and answered with measured calm, trying my vocal cords at the same tone he’d employed when I’d been crying for us to make our flight not two hours before.

“Oh, I’d say another half hour or so, if I’ve got my directions right. Not to worry, Jeeves! It’ll only be a little longer. I’m sure that Bingo wouldn’t mind if you had a bit of a lie-down while he shows me ‘round the place.”

Jeeves shifted back, and his eyes seemed to lock stock-still ahead of him. With an unsteady hand (though one supposes that said unsteadiness could be attributed to the vibration of the car,) he withdrew a handkerchief from his breast pocket to press at the sweating red patches over his map. The other looked as if it would crush the hat still sitting tidily in his lap. Jeeves squirmed oddly in his seat, bounced an uneasy leg a few times, and, after another minute or so, he addressed me in the most low and frankly desperate voice I’d ever heard of anybody, all trace of its normal formality and pleasant veneer washed away.

“Please....” He paused to breathe; the silence drew my eyes again, and I noticed with a sudden jolt that one of his hands had disappeared beneath the bowler hat. I looked away at once, of course. Then back again. “I am sorry sir... terribly sorry, for this... indiscretion. But you must stop.” Although I depressed the brakes as Jeeves requested, I too began to question him, bewildered.

“Whatever for, Jeeves?” He had turned his attention from me again, reverting back into that tense near-sitting position with his eyes shut tight. His hand was still conspicuously absent from the scene. “We’ll be at Bingo’s in twenty minutes. You can rest then.”

“Please, sir, I... have to urinate,” he stumbled out in a sharp breath, his face turning, if possible, more deeply red about the ears and cheeks. What with Jeeves’ embarrassment and the very nature of this predicament, I felt my face flush too, and didn’t say anything as I stopped the car by the roadside. The landscape about us was completely open, not a shrubbery or tree or any other convenient foliage in sight. Just rolling hills and low, golden grass.

Perhaps steeling himself to stand, Jeeves remained in his contorted state for a good few moments with his long legs openly crossed. (I openly stared, but that, surely, is another matter entirely.) When he at last stood, it was with near-inhuman swiftness, and Jeeves didn’t even bother to close the door behind him. He took only a few, jolted steps from the vehicle before casting off his gloves and, one presumes, working at his trouser buttons. There was the shifting of fabric, and some labored breathing, and then there was the distinct and awfully loud sound of a stream pouring into a puddle in the mud beside the road.

I was still (understandably) extremely embarrassed by it all, and looked away to give my man some semblance of privacy. I was also (less-understandably) beginning to feel a little hot under the collar, and found it necessary to echo Jeeves by relocating my headgear into my lap. The sound, the image of Jeeves’ total discomposure, the long, deep breath I heard escape from him as he found relief—all of these served to stoke a flame that I never knew existed in the Wooster psyche.

It went on for ages, and, even through the haze of half-mortification and half-bemused arousal, I had to wonder how I could have missed all the signs so plainly presented to me. I’d wager I stopped him relieving himself before leaving the flat; I’d swallowed the “vertebral” drivel without a murmur, and even when he was on the verge of the unthinkable, I needed to be told before I fully understood. It was the miracle of belief, I suppose: belief that marvels such as Jeeves truly exist above the needs of us mere mortals.

After a disconcertingly long while—what seemed minutes, but probably could be capped at one—the gushing diminished into pattering raindrops, and then ceased altogether. The prospect of Jeeves’ return to the car shuddered through me like a death knell. Incredible awkwardness was on the horizon. I think that Jeeves prolonged his stay at the roadside for this very reason. For several moments he remained with his back to me, tugging at his jacket, pulling his gloves on again, and slowly retrieving the bowler that had been hurled from his lap to the ground beside the car. He’d lost it in his haste to exit the two-seater, and held it in both hands again, appearing to examine it for damage before replacing it on his head of sleek black hair.

The poor man could hardly meet my eyes on turning around. He was flushing as before, though the remainder of his face was significantly less pale. Despite the fluttery feeling in my stomach (and other, ruder places;) despite the fact that this Wooster rarely lives up to the might of his ancestors at Agincourt, I managed to break in with some words of assurance.

“Are you feeling all right now, Jeeves?” I questioned cheerily as ever, and offered him a smile. Jeeves met my eyes sharply. Then, with a dry twitch of the lips, he folded his re-gloved hands in his lap and settled peacefully into his seat.

“Thank you, yes, sir. Much relieved.”

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