“I will do my best, sir.”
“I knew it, Jeeves, I knew it. Don’t forget to put in plenty of socks.”
“No, sir.”
“Also of tennis shirts not a few.”
“Very good, sir.”
I left him to his packing, and a couple of days later we started off for Marvis Bay, where I had taken a cottage for July and August.
I don’t know if you know Marvis Bay? It’s in Dorsetshire, and, while not what you would call a fiercely exciting spot, has many good points. You spend the day there bathing and sitting on the sands, and in the evening you stroll out on the shore with the mosquitoes. At nine p.m. you rub ointment on the wounds and go to bed. It was a simple, healthy life, and it seemed to suit poor old Freddie absolutely. Once the moon was up and the breeze sighing in the trees, you couldn’t drag him from that beach with rope. He became quite a popular pet with the mosquitoes. They would hang round waiting for him to come out, and would give a miss to perfectly good strollers just so as to be in good condition for him.
It was during the day that I found Freddie, poor old chap, a trifle heavy as a guest. I suppose you can’t blame a bloke whose heart is broken, but it required a good deal of fortitude to bear up against this gloom-crushed exhibit during the early days of our little holiday. When he wasn’t chewing a pipe and scowling at the carpet, he was sitting at the piano, playing “ The Rosary ” with one finger. He couldn’t play anything except “ The Rosary ,” and he couldn’t play much of that. However firmly and confidently he started off, somewhere around the third bar a fuse would blow out and he would have to start all over again.
He was playing it as usual one morning when I came in from bathing and it seemed to me that he was extracting more hideous melancholy