Absent Treatment
by P. G. Wodehouse
I want to tell you
all about dear old Bobbie Cardew. It's a most interesting story. I can't put in
any literary style and all that; but I don't have to, don't you know, because
it goes on its Moral Lesson. If you're a man you mustn't miss it, because it'll
be a warning to you; and if you're a woman you won't want to, because it's all
about how a girl made a man feel pretty well fed up with things.
If you're a recent
acquaintance of Bobbie's, you'll probably be surprised to hear that there was a
time when he was more remarkable for the weakness of his memory than anything
else. Dozens of fellows, who have only met Bobbie since the change took place,
have been surprised when I told them that. Yet it's true. Believe _me_.
In the days when I
first knew him Bobbie Cardew was about the most pronounced young rotter inside
the four-mile radius. People have called me a silly ass, but I was never in the
same class with Bobbie. When it came to being a silly ass, he was a plus-four
man, while my handicap was about six. Why, if I wanted him to dine with me, I
used to post him a letter at the beginning of the week, and then the day before
send him a telegram and a phone-call on the day itself, and--half an hour
before the time we'd fixed--a messenger in a taxi, whose business it was to see
that he got in and that the chauffeur had the address all correct. By doing
this I generally managed to get him, unless he had left town before my
messenger arrived.
The funny thing was
that he wasn't altogether a fool in other ways. Deep down in him there was a
kind of stratum of sense. I had known him, once or twice, show an almost human
intelligence. But to reach that stratum, mind you, you needed dynamite.
At least, that's
what I thought. But there was another way which hadn't occurred to me.
Marriage, I mean. Marriage, the dynamite of the soul; that was what hit Bobbie.
He married. Have you ever seen a bull-pup chasing a bee? The pup sees the bee.
It looks good to him. But he still doesn't know what's at the end of it till he
gets there. It was like that with Bobbie. He fell in love, got married--with a
sort of whoop, as if it were the greatest fun in the world--and then began to
find out things.
She wasn't the sort
of girl you would have expected Bobbie to rave about. And yet, I don't know.
What I mean is, she worked for her living; and to a fellow who has never done a
hand's turn in his life there's undoubtedly a sort of fascination, a kind of
romance, about a girl who works for her living.
Her name was
Anthony. Mary Anthony. She was about five feet six; she had a ton and a half of
red-gold hair, grey eyes, and one of those determined chins. She was a hospital
nurse. When Bobbie smashed himself up at polo, she was told off by the
authorities to smooth his brow and rally round with cooling unguents and all
that; and the old boy hadn't been up and about again for more than a week
before they popped off to the registrar's and fixed it up. Quite the romance.
Bobbie broke the
news to me at the club one evening, and next day he introduced me to her. I
admired her. I've never worked myself--my name's Pepper, by the way. Almost
forgot to mention it. Reggie Pepper. My uncle Edward was Pepper, Wells, and
Co., the Colliery people. He left me a sizable chunk of bullion--I say I've
never worked myself, but I admire any one who earns a living under
difficulties, especially a girl. And this girl had had a rather unusually tough
time of it, being an orphan and all that, and having had to do everything off
her own bat for years.
Mary and I got along
together splendidly. We don't now, but we'll come to that later. I'm speaking
of the past. She seemed to think Bobbie the greatest thing on earth, judging by
the way she looked at him when she thought I wasn't noticing. And Bobbie seemed
to think the same about her. So that I came to the conclusion that, if only
dear old Bobbie didn't forget to go to the wedding, they had a sporting chance
of being quite happy.
Well, let's brisk
up a bit here, and jump a year. The story doesn't really start till then.
They took a flat
and settled down. I was in and out of the place quite a good deal. I kept my
eyes open, and everything seemed to me to be running along as smoothly as you
could want. If this was marriage, I thought, I couldn't see why fellows were so
frightened of it. There were a lot of worse things that could happen to a man.
But we now come to
the incident of the quiet Dinner, and it's just here that love's young dream
hits a snag, and things begin to occur.
I happened to meet
Bobbie in Piccadilly, and he asked me to come back to dinner at the flat. And,
like a fool, instead of bolting and putting myself under police protection, I
went.
When we got to the
flat, there was Mrs. Bobbie looking--well, I tell you, it staggered me. Her
gold hair was all piled up in waves and crinkles and things, with a
what-d'-you-call-it of diamonds in it. And she was wearing the most perfectly
ripping dress. I couldn't begin to describe it. I can only say it was the
limit. It struck me that if this was how she was in the habit of looking every
night when they were dining quietly at home together, it was no wonder that
Bobbie liked domesticity.
"Here's old
Reggie, dear," said Bobbie. "I've brought him home to have a bit of
dinner. I'll phone down to the kitchen and ask them to send it up
now--what?"
She stared at him
as if she had never seen him before. Then she turned scarlet. Then she turned
as white as a sheet. Then she gave a little laugh. It was most interesting to
watch. Made me wish I was up a tree about eight hundred miles away. Then she
recovered herself.
"I am so glad
you were able to come, Mr. Pepper," she said, smiling at me.
And after that she
was all right. At least, you would have said so. She talked a lot at dinner,
and chaffed Bobbie, and played us ragtime on the piano afterwards, as if she
hadn't a care in the world. Quite a jolly little party it was--not. I'm no
lynx-eyed sleuth, and all that sort of thing, but I had seen her face at the
beginning, and I knew that she was working the whole time and working hard, to
keep herself in hand, and that she would have given that diamond
what's-its-name in her hair and everything else she possessed to have one good
scream--just one. I've sat through some pretty thick evenings in my time, but
that one had the rest beaten in a canter. At the very earliest moment I grabbed
my hat and got away.
Having seen what I
did, I wasn't particularly surprised to meet Bobbie at the club next day
looking about as merry and bright as a lonely gum-drop at an Eskimo tea-party.
He started in
straightway. He seemed glad to have someone to talk to about it.
"Do you know
how long I've been married?" he said.
I didn't exactly.
"About a year,
isn't it?"
"Not _about_ a
year," he said sadly. "Exactly a year--yesterday!"
Then I understood.
I saw light--a regular flash of light.
"Yesterday
was----?"
"The
anniversary of the wedding. I'd arranged to take Mary to the Savoy, and on to
Covent Garden. She particularly wanted to hear Caruso. I had the ticket for the
box in my pocket. Do you know, all through dinner I had a kind of rummy idea
that there was something I'd forgotten, but I couldn't think what?"
"Till your
wife mentioned it?"
He nodded----
"She--mentioned
it," he said thoughtfully.
I didn't ask for
details. Women with hair and chins like Mary's may be angels most of the time,
but, when they take off their wings for a bit, they aren't half-hearted about it.
"To be
absolutely frank, old top," said poor old Bobbie, in a broken sort of way,
"my stock's pretty low at home."
There didn't seem
much to be done. I just lit a cigarette and sat there. He didn't want to talk.
Presently he went out. I stood at the window of our upper smoking-room, which
looks out on to Piccadilly, and watched him. He walked slowly along for a few
yards, stopped, then walked on again, and finally turned into a jeweller's.
Which was an instance of what I meant when I said that deep down in him there
was a certain stratum of sense.
* * * * *
It was from now on
that I began to be really interested in this problem of Bobbie's married life.
Of course, one's always mildly interested in one's friends' marriages, hoping
they'll turn out well and all that; but this was different. The average man
isn't like Bobbie, and the average girl isn't like Mary. It was that old
business of the immovable mass and the irresistible force. There was Bobbie,
ambling gently through life, a dear old chap in a hundred ways, but undoubtedly
a chump of the first water.
And there was Mary,
determined that he shouldn't be a chump. And Nature, mind you, on Bobbie's
side. When Nature makes a chump like dear old Bobbie, she's proud of him, and
doesn't want her handiwork disturbed. She gives him a sort of natural armour to
protect him against outside interference. And that armour is shortness of
memory. Shortness of memory keeps a man a chump, when, but for it, he might
cease to be one. Take my case, for instance. I'm a chump. Well, if I had
remembered half the things people have tried to teach me during my life, my
size in hats would be about number nine. But I didn't. I forgot them. And it
was just the same with Bobbie.
For about a week,
perhaps a bit more, the recollection of that quiet little domestic evening
bucked him up like a tonic. Elephants, I read somewhere, are champions at the
memory business, but they were fools to Bobbie during that week. But, bless
you, the shock wasn't nearly big enough. It had dinted the armour, but it
hadn't made a hole in it. Pretty soon he was back at the old game.
It was pathetic,
don't you know. The poor girl loved him, and she was frightened. It was the
thin edge of the wedge, you see, and she knew it. A man who forgets what day he
was married, when he's been married one year, will forget, at about the end of
the fourth, that he's married at all. If she meant to get him in hand at all,
she had got to do it now, before he began to drift away.
I saw that clearly
enough, and I tried to make Bobbie see it, when he was by way of pouring out
his troubles to me one afternoon. I can't remember what it was that he had
forgotten the day before, but it was something she had asked him to bring home
for her--it may have been a book.
"It's such a
little thing to make a fuss about," said Bobbie. "And she knows that
it's simply because I've got such an infernal memory about everything. I can't
remember anything. Never could."
He talked on for a
while, and, just as he was going, he pulled out a couple of sovereigns.
"Oh, by the
way," he said.
"What's this
for?" I asked, though I knew.
"I owe it
you."
"How's
that?" I said.
"Why, that bet
on Tuesday. In the billiard-room. Murray and Brown were playing a hundred up,
and I gave you two to one that Brown would win, and Murray beat him by twenty
odd."
"So you do
remember some things?" I said.
He got quite
excited. Said that if I thought he was the sort of rotter who forgot to pay
when he lost a bet, it was pretty rotten of me after knowing him all these
years, and a lot more like that.
"Subside,
laddie," I said.
Then I spoke to him
like a father.
"What you've
got to do, my old college chum," I said, "is to pull yourself
together, and jolly quick, too. As things are shaping, you're due for a nasty
knock before you know what's hit you. You've got to make an effort. Don't say
you can't. This two quid business shows that, even if your memory is rocky, you
can remember some things. What you've got to do is to see that wedding
anniversaries and so on are included in the list. It may be a brainstrain, but
you can't get out of it."
"I suppose
you're right," said Bobbie. "But it beats me why she thinks such a
lot of these rotten little dates. What's it matter if I forgot what day we were
married on or what day she was born on or what day the cat had the measles? She
knows I love her just as much as if I were a memorizing freak at the
halls."
"That's not
enough for a woman," I said. "They want to be shown. Bear that in
mind, and you're all right. Forget it, and there'll be trouble."
He chewed the knob
of his stick.
"Women are
frightfully rummy," he said gloomily.
"You should
have thought of that before you married one," I said.
* * * * *
I don't see that I
could have done any more. I had put the whole thing in a nutshell for him. You
would have thought he'd have seen the point, and that it would have made him
brace up and get a hold on himself. But no. Off he went again in the same old
way. I gave up arguing with him. I had a good deal of time on my hands, but not
enough to amount to anything when it was a question of reforming dear old
Bobbie by argument. If you see a man asking for trouble, and insisting on
getting it, the only thing to do is to stand by and wait till it comes to him.
After that you may get a chance. But till then there's nothing to be done. But
I thought a lot about him.
Bobbie didn't get
into the soup all at once. Weeks went by, and months, and still nothing
happened. Now and then he'd come into the club with a kind of cloud on his
shining morning face, and I'd know that there had been doings in the home; but
it wasn't till well on in the spring that he got the thunderbolt just where he
had been asking for it--in the thorax.
I was smoking a
quiet cigarette one morning in the window looking out over Piccadilly, and
watching the buses and motors going up one way and down the other--most
interesting it is; I often do it--when in rushed Bobbie, with his eyes bulging
and his face the colour of an oyster, waving a piece of paper in his hand.
"Reggie,"
he said. "Reggie, old top, she's gone!"
"Gone!" I
said. "Who?"
"Mary, of
course! Gone! Left me! Gone!"
"Where?"
I said.
Silly question?
Perhaps you're right. Anyhow, dear old Bobbie nearly foamed at the mouth.
"Where? How
should I know where? Here, read this."
He pushed the paper
into my hand. It was a letter.
"Go on,"
said Bobbie. "Read it."
So I did. It
certainly was quite a letter. There was not much of it, but it was all to the
point. This is what it said:
"MY DEAR
BOBBIE,--I am going away. When you care enough about me
to remember to wish
me many happy returns on my birthday, I will
come back. My
address will be Box 341, London Morning News."
I read it twice,
then I said, "Well, why don't you?"
"Why don't I
what?"
"Why don't you
wish her many happy returns? It doesn't seem much to ask."
"But she says
on her birthday."
"Well, when is
her birthday?"
"Can't you
understand?" said Bobbie. "I've forgotten."
"Forgotten!"
I said.
"Yes,"
said Bobbie. "Forgotten."
"How do you
mean, forgotten?" I said. "Forgotten whether it's the twentieth or
the twenty-first, or what? How near do you get to it?"
"I know it
came somewhere between the first of January and the thirty-first of December.
That's how near I get to it."
"Think."
"Think? What's
the use of saying 'Think'? Think I haven't thought? I've been knocking sparks
out of my brain ever since I opened that letter."
"And you can't
remember?"
"No."
I rang the bell and
ordered restoratives.
"Well,
Bobbie," I said, "it's a pretty hard case to spring on an untrained
amateur like me. Suppose someone had come to Sherlock Holmes and said, 'Mr.
Holmes, here's a case for you. When is my wife's birthday?' Wouldn't that have
given Sherlock a jolt? However, I know enough about the game to understand that
a fellow can't shoot off his deductive theories unless you start him with a
clue, so rouse yourself out of that pop-eyed trance and come across with two or
three. For instance, can't you remember the last time she had a birthday? What
sort of weather was it? That might fix the month."
Bobbie shook his
head.
"It was just
ordinary weather, as near as I can recollect."
"Warm?"
"Warmish."
"Or
cold?"
"Well, fairly
cold, perhaps. I can't remember."
I ordered two more
of the same. They seemed indicated in the Young Detective's Manual.
"You're a great help, Bobbie," I said. "An invaluable assistant.
One of those indispensable adjuncts without which no home is complete."
Bobbie seemed to be
thinking.
"I've got
it," he said suddenly. "Look here. I gave her a present on her last
birthday. All we have to do is to go to the shop, hunt up the date when it was
bought, and the thing's done."
"Absolutely.
What did you give her?"
He sagged.
"I can't
remember," he said.
Getting ideas is
like golf. Some days you're right off, others it's as easy as falling off a
log. I don't suppose dear old Bobbie had ever had two ideas in the same morning
before in his life; but now he did it without an effort. He just loosed another
dry Martini into the undergrowth, and before you could turn round it had
flushed quite a brain-wave.
Do you know those
little books called _When were you Born_? There's one for each month. They tell
you your character, your talents, your strong points, and your weak points at
fourpence halfpenny a go. Bobbie's idea was to buy the whole twelve, and go
through them till we found out which month hit off Mary's character. That would
give us the month, and narrow it down a whole lot.
A pretty hot idea
for a non-thinker like dear old Bobbie. We sallied out at once. He took half
and I took half, and we settled down to work. As I say, it sounded good. But
when we came to go into the thing, we saw that there was a flaw. There was
plenty of information all right, but there wasn't a single month that didn't
have something that exactly hit off Mary. For instance, in the December book it
said, "December people are apt to keep their own secrets. They are extensive
travellers." Well, Mary had certainly kept her secret, and she had
travelled quite extensively enough for Bobbie's needs. Then, October people
were "born with original ideas" and "loved moving." You
couldn't have summed up Mary's little jaunt more neatly. February people had
"wonderful memories"--Mary's speciality.
We took a bit of a
rest, then had another go at the thing.
Bobbie was all for
May, because the book said that women born in that month were "inclined to
be capricious, which is always a barrier to a happy married life"; but I
plumped for February, because February women "are unusually determined to
have their own way, are very earnest, and expect a full return in their
companion or mates." Which he owned was about as like Mary as anything
could be.
In the end he tore
the books up, stamped on them, burnt them, and went home.
It was wonderful
what a change the next few days made in dear old Bobbie. Have you ever seen
that picture, "The Soul's Awakening"? It represents a flapper of
sorts gazing in a startled sort of way into the middle distance with a look in
her eyes that seems to say, "Surely that is George's step I hear on the
mat! Can this be love?" Well, Bobbie had a soul's awakening too. I don't
suppose he had ever troubled to think in his life before--not really _think_.
But now he was wearing his brain to the bone. It was painful in a way, of
course, to see a fellow human being so thoroughly in the soup, but I felt
strongly that it was all for the best. I could see as plainly as possible that
all these brainstorms were improving Bobbie out of knowledge. When it was all
over he might possibly become a rotter again of a sort, but it would only be a
pale reflection of the rotter he had been. It bore out the idea I had always
had that what he needed was a real good jolt.
I saw a great deal
of him these days. I was his best friend, and he came to me for sympathy. I
gave it him, too, with both hands, but I never failed to hand him the Moral
Lesson when I had him weak.
One day he came to
me as I was sitting in the club, and I could see that he had had an idea. He
looked happier than he had done in weeks.
"Reggie,"
he said, "I'm on the trail. This time I'm convinced that I shall pull it
off. I've remembered something of vital importance."
"Yes?" I
said.
"I remember
distinctly," he said, "that on Mary's last birthday we went together
to the Coliseum. How does that hit you?"
"It's a fine
bit of memorizing," I said; "but how does it help?"
"Why, they
change the programme every week there."
"Ah!" I
said. "Now you are talking."
"And the week
we went one of the turns was Professor Some One's Terpsichorean Cats. I
recollect them distinctly. Now, are we narrowing it down, or aren't we? Reggie,
I'm going round to the Coliseum this minute, and I'm going to dig the date of
those Terpsichorean Cats out of them, if I have to use a crowbar."
So that got him
within six days; for the management treated us like brothers; brought out the
archives, and ran agile fingers over the pages till they treed the cats in the
middle of May.
"I told you it
was May," said Bobbie. "Maybe you'll listen to me another time."
"If you've any
sense," I said, "there won't be another time."
And Bobbie said
that there wouldn't.
Once you get your
money on the run, it parts as if it enjoyed doing it. I had just got off to
sleep that night when my telephone-bell rang. It was Bobbie, of course. He
didn't apologize.
"Reggie,"
he said, "I've got it now for certain. It's just come to me. We saw those
Terpsichorean Cats at a matinee, old man."
"Yes?" I
said.
"Well, don't
you see that that brings it down to two days? It must have been either
Wednesday the seventh or Saturday the tenth."
"Yes," I
said, "if they didn't have daily matinees at the Coliseum."
I heard him give a
sort of howl.
"Bobbie,"
I said. My feet were freezing, but I was fond of him.
“Well?"
"I've
remembered something too. It's this. The day you went to the Coliseum I lunched
with you both at the Ritz. You had forgotten to bring any money with you, so
you wrote a cheque."
"But I'm
always writing cheques."
"You are. But
this was for a tenner, and made out to the hotel. Hunt up your cheque-book and
see how many cheques for ten pounds payable to the Ritz Hotel you wrote out
between May the fifth and May the tenth."
He gave a kind of
gulp.
"Reggie,"
he said, "you're a genius. I've always said so. I believe you've got it.
Hold the line."
Presently he came
back again.
"Halloa!"
he said.
“I'm here," I
said.
"It was the
eighth. Reggie, old man, I----"
"Topping,"
I said. "Good night."
It was working
along into the small hours now, but I thought I might as well make a night of
it and finish the thing up, so I rang up an hotel near the Strand.
"Put me
through to Mrs. Cardew," I said.
"It's
late," said the man at the other end.
"And getting
later every minute," I said. "Buck along, laddie."
I waited patiently.
I had missed my beauty-sleep, and my feet had frozen hard, but I was past
regrets.
"What is the
matter?" said Mary's voice.
"My feet are
cold," I said. "But I didn't call you up to tell you that
particularly. I've just been chatting with Bobbie, Mrs. Cardew."
"Oh! is that
Mr. Pepper?"
"Yes. He's
remembered it, Mrs. Cardew."
She gave a sort of
scream. I've often thought how interesting it must be to be one of those
Exchange girls. The things they must hear, don't you know. Bobbie's howl and
gulp and Mrs. Bobbie's scream and all about my feet and all that. Most
interesting it must be.
"He's
remembered it!" she gasped. "Did you tell him?"
"No."
Well, I hadn't.
"Mr.
Pepper."
"Yes?"
"Was he--has
he been--was he very worried?"
I chuckled. This
was where I was billed to be the life and soul of the party.
"Worried! He
was about the most worried man between here and Edinburgh. He has been worrying
as if he was paid to do it by the nation. He has started out to worry after
breakfast, and----"
Oh, well, you can
never tell with women. My idea was that we should pass the rest of the night
slapping each other on the back across the wire, and telling each other what
bally brainy conspirators we were, don't you know, and all that. But I'd got
just as far as this, when she bit at me. Absolutely! I heard the snap. And then
she said "Oh!" in that choked kind of way. And when a woman says
"Oh!" like that, it means all the bad words she'd love to say if she
only knew them.
And then she began.
"What brutes
men are! What horrid brutes! How you could stand by and see poor dear Bobbie
worrying himself into a fever, when a word from you would have put everything
right, I can't----"
"But----"
"And you call
yourself his friend! His friend!" (Metallic laugh, most unpleasant.)
"It shows how one can be deceived. I used to think you a kind-hearted
man."
"But, I say,
when I suggested the thing, you thought it perfectly----"
"I thought it
hateful, abominable."
"But you said
it was absolutely top----"
"I said
nothing of the kind. And if I did, I didn't mean it. I don't wish to be unjust,
Mr. Pepper, but I must say that to me there seems to be something positively
fiendish in a man who can go out of his way to separate a husband from his
wife, simply in order to amuse himself by gloating over his agony----"
"But----!"
"When one
single word would have----"
"But you made
me promise not to----" I bleated.
"And if I did,
do you suppose I didn't expect you to have the sense to break your
promise?"
I had finished. I
had no further observations to make. I hung up the receiver, and crawled into
bed.
* * * * *
I still see Bobbie
when he comes to the club, but I do not visit the old homestead. He is
friendly, but he stops short of issuing invitations. I ran across Mary at the
Academy last week, and her eyes went through me like a couple of bullets
through a pat of butter. And as they came out the other side, and I limped off
to piece myself together again, there occurred to me the simple epitaph which,
when I am no more, I intend to have inscribed on my tombstone. It was this:
"He was a man who acted from the best motives. There is one born every
minute."