A HUNDRED years ago today, September 18th 1915, the world met P.G. Wodehouse’s two most memorable characters—the eternally idle and good-natured Bertie Wooster and his matchless manservant Jeeves—for the first time. They appeared in “Extricating Young Gussie”, a short story that ran in the American magazine the Saturday Evening Post. “Gussie” came garnished with all the elements that would become Wodehousian staples: witty prose, cheery “What ho’s!”, imposing aunts, and Bertie’s bungling knight errantry.
But there was one notable exception: Jeeves scarcely got a mention. “I still blush to think of the off-hand way I treated him at our first encounter,” wrote Wodehouse. He would flesh him out later. “[A] tallish man, with one those dark, shrewd faces” who brings order to the scrape-ridden world of Bertie and his friends with noiseless omniscience. In that first story, however, there is no hint that we are in the presence of a “bird of the ripest intelligence”, who “From the collar upward…stands alone.” It is later we learn that this is a being who can cure hangovers, quote Keats, Burns and Scott fluidly, and whose encyclopedic knowledge extends from the mottled sub-branches of the English peerage to American ornithology and the complete works of Spinoza and Nietzsche. (He dismisses the latter as “fundamentally unsound.”) But in “Gussie” Jeeves does do the thing that would become a sacred ritual between valet and master: bringing Bertie his morning tea.
Over the next six decades, in 11 novels and 35 short stories, through the purloining of manuscripts and cow-creamers, and the puncturing of hot-water bottles, this tender morning exchange would anchor, soothe, and refresh the relationship between Bertie and Jeeves. The tea is always perfect: “Not too hot, not too sweet, not too weak, not too strong, not too much milk, not a drop spilled in the saucer.” It is over the “vital oolong” that the day’s business is discussed and entanglements pondered. While Bertie is “sucking down a cheerful mouthful” Jeeves will unerringly advise him which horse to bet on and which to avoid (“The stable is not sanguine”), while firmly informing him that he has given away the white mess jacket, loud checked suit or bilious green tie. As sartorial gatekeeper Jeeves is unbending. Sometimes, Bertie will protest—“But lots of fellows have asked me who my tailor is”. But mostly he will yield to good sense—“Doubtless in order to avoid him, sir.” He knows, of course, that life without Jeeves serving him the “healing brew” does not bear thinking about.
If Jeeves is the soul of solicitude, Bertie’s aunts, Agatha (“an eye like a man-eating fish”) and Dahlia (“carrying voice”), are manifestly less so. Bertie is never more vulnerable than when he is peremptorily roused by one of his “aged relations”, as happens in “Extricating Young Gussie”. It is fitting that the opening line of the inaugural story is: “She sprang it on me before breakfast.” Assaulted by the commanding presence of Aunt Agatha in the small hours (half-past eleven), and barely able to un-gum a weary eyelid, Bertie calls for the cavalry: “I bleated weakly to Jeeves to bring me tea.” Within minutes, he writes, “Jeeves came in with the tea.”
Clearly Wodehouse had not yet conceived of Jeeves’ full potential, because this is one of the rare occasions where he does something as pedestrian as “come” into a room. As every Wodehouse aficionado from England to India—where he is exceedingly popular—knows, Jeeves never walks. He materialises or shimmers or floats or glides or slides like a liquid mix of eel and ectoplasm. And when he's serving early morning tea—not a minute before the crack of noon—his movements are suitably simpatico. Silence is as vital as the oolong, since Jeeves is ever mindful of Mr Wooster’s nasty hangover acquired at Pongo Twistelton’s birthday party or a riotous night out on the town with fellow wastrels Tuppy Glossop, Bingo Little, or Boko Fittleworth. All of whom Jeeves will help extricate when they are “knee-deep in the bouillon.”
Bertie is not the brightest bulb in the chandelier. By his own admission, “I can't read before I’ve had my morning tea and a cigarette,” and even then his wattage is unlikely to dazzle. Not that it matters too much. Bertie rarely troubles himself with onerous chores like getting a job or small annoyances like world wars. We know he’s hazily aware of external turbulence when he refers to Jeeves as his “domestic Mussolini” or urges the starving Tuppy Glossop to show restraint and “Think of Gandhi.” But otherwise, though Wodehouse wrote his novels through two world wars, the holocaust, gulags, and the cold war, he retained the unruffled fiction of an Edwardian England preserved in the aspic of Empire and entitlement. In Woosterland, it is always spring and there is always time for tea.