The Code of the Woosters

Constable Oates grabs the helmet and clasps it to his chest with “visible ecstasy,” while the butler explains that he found it in the flowerbed minutes after glimpsing Wooster drop something from his window. Dahlia leaps to her nephew’s defense, claiming that Watkyn’s butler either must be mistaken about the window of egress or must be the thief himself. Wooster joins in her attempt at blame-shifting, concurring that the butler had a “furtive eye.” However, Sir Watkyn will hear none of it and vows to give Wooster the stiffest possible sentence for the helmet’s theft. The only mercy he offers is to allow Wooster to remain in his room for the night, under house arrest, with Oates standing guard beneath his window. Watkyn, Oates, and Dahlia depart, leaving Wooster all alone in the locked room, facing the prospect of a month in prison—a place he has always, in his previous misadventures, managed to avoid.

Jeeves, who has been unable to locate Spode to obtain an alibi for the theft of the cow creamer, now taps at the door, and Wooster updates him on the latest events. In turn, Jeeves relates that Sir Watkyn has forbidden his niece’s marriage to Harold Pinker, who has been identified as the attacker who kept Oates from catching the creamer thief. Jeeves can offer no solution to Stiffy’s problem or to his own and takes serious exception to Wooster’s plan, which is that Jeeves should knock Oates out with a shovel so that Wooster can escape through the window on knotted sheets. At this point, Sir Watkyn unlocks the door so that Aunt Dahlia can have a word alone with her nephew. She tells him that Watkyn has agreed to drop the charges against Wooster but only on the condition that Anatole, Dahlia’s brilliant chef, leave her employ for Watkyn’s. Wooster demands that she rescind this deal and, as reward for his own self-sacrifice, drafts a long, elaborate menu of fine dishes that he would like Anatole to make for him after his prison stretch. Sir Watkyn responds bitterly to his noble gesture and tries to renege on his offer of house arrest: Wooster, he says, will go to jail immediately. Jeeves, however, has managed to locate Roderick Spode, who stammers out a false confession to Watkyn: It was he, he says, who stole Oates’s helmet—just as he once did in his college days. A stunned Watkyn apologizes to Wooster and reluctantly gives him permission to depart at his leisure.

After some bemusement, Wooster realizes that Jeeves engineered his exoneration by putting the squeeze on Roderick Spode with his knowledge of “Eulalie.” Jeeves now urges Wooster to try a little extortion himself on Sir Watkyn, by threatening to charge him with “wrongful arrest and defamation of character before witnesses” (250) unless he approves both Stiffy’s and Madeline’s engagements. Wooster does so, and he demands back the five pounds that Watkyn fined him for his previous theft of a police helmet. Watkyn agrees and departs, so distracted that he forgets to call off Constable Oates’s guard duty. Lounging in bed, Wooster requests just one more thing of Jeeves to make the evening perfect: The full details of the dark secret of “Eulalie.” Jeeves hesitates to say, since it would be grounds for expulsion from his club, but finally relents on the condition that Wooster agree to the “Round-the-World cruise” that Jeeves has long suggested. Eulalie, he says, is the name of a line of women’s underwear that Spode secretly designs and sells in a fancy boutique on Bond Street. No fascist leader, Wooster concurs, could survive a scandal like that. He agrees to the cruise, and Jeeves informs him that he has already bought the tickets. In his warm bed, Wooster drifts blissfully off to sleep, hearing the miserable coughs of the weary Constable Oates pacing beneath his window.