Letter #64 from My Pal Bertie
Claude and Eustace discuss Bertie's plans for the evening's entertainment.
Anything merrier and brighter than the Twins, when they curveted into the old flat while I was dressing for dinner the next night, I have never struck in my whole puff. I’m only about half a dozen years older than Claude and Eustace, but in some rummy manner they always make me feel as if I were well on in the grandfather class and just waiting for the end. Almost before I realised they were in the place, they had collared the best chairs, pinched a couple of my special cigarettes, poured themselves out a whisky-and-soda apiece, and started to prattle with the gaiety and abandon of two birds who had achieved their life’s ambition instead of having come a most frightful purler and being under sentence of exile.
“Hallo, Bertie, old thing,” said Claude. “Jolly decent of you to put us up.”
“Oh, no,” I said. “Only wish you were staying a good long time.”
“Hear that, Eustace? He wishes we were staying a good long time.”
“I expect it will seem a good long time,” said Eustace, philosophically.
“You heard about the binge, Bertie? Our little bit of trouble, I mean?”
“Oh, yes. Aunt Agatha was telling me.”
“We leave our country for our country’s good,” said Eustace.
“And let there be no moaning at the bar,” said Claude, “when I put out to sea. What did Aunt Agatha tell you?”
“She said you poured lemonade on the Junior Dean.”
“I wish the deuce,” said Claude, annoyed, “that people would get these things right. It wasn’t the Junior Dean. It was the Senior Tutor.”
“And it wasn’t lemonade,” said Eustace. “It was soda-water. The dear old thing happened to be standing just under our window while I was leaning out with a siphon in my hand. He looked up, and—well, it would have been chucking away the opportunity of a lifetime if I hadn’t let him have it in the eyeball.”
“Simply chucking it away,” agreed Claude.
“Might never have occurred again,” said Eustace.
“Hundred to one against it,” said Claude.
“Now what,” said Eustace, “do you propose to do, Bertie, in the way of entertaining the handsome guests to-night?”
“My idea was to have a bite of dinner in the flat,” I said. “Jeeves is getting it ready now.”
“And afterwards?”
“Well, I thought we might chat of this and that, and then it struck me that you would probably like to turn in early, as your train goes about ten or something, doesn’t it?”
The twins looked at each other in a pitying sort of way.
“Bertie,” said Eustace, “you’ve got the programme nearly right, but not quite. I envisage the evening’s events thus: We will toddle along to Ciro’s after dinner. It’s an extension night, isn’t it? Well, that will see us through till about two-thirty or three.”
“After which, no doubt,” said Claude, “the Lord will provide.”
“But I thought you would want to get a good night’s rest.”
“Good night’s rest!” said Eustace. “My dear old chap, you don’t for a moment imagine that we are dreaming of going to bed to-night, do you?”
Will report on events as soon as I am able…
Bertie