'Right! First rehearsal for lines and business at eleven sharp tomorrow morning.'
Poor old Freddie was in such a gloomy frame of mind that I decided not to tell him the idea till we had finished coaching the child. He wasn't in the mood to have a thing like that hanging over him. So we concentrated on Tootles. And pretty early in the proceedings we saw that the only way to get Tootles worked up to the spirit of the thing was to introduce sweets of some sort as a sub-motive, so to speak.
'The chief difficulty, sir,' said Jeeves, at the end of the first rehearsal, 'is, as I envisage it, to establish in the young gentleman's mind a connexion between the words we desire him to say and the refreshment.'
'Exactly,' I said. 'Once the blighter has grasped the basic fact that these two words, clearly spoken, result automatically in chocolate nougat, we have got a success.'
I've often thought how interesting it must be to be one of those animal-trainer blokes—to stimulate the dawning intelligence and all that. Well, this was every bit as exciting. Some days success seemed to be staring us in the eyeball, and the kid got out the line as if he had been an old professional. And then he would go all to pieces again. And time was flying.
'We must hurry up, Jeeves,' I said. 'The kid's uncle may arrive any day now and take him away.'
'Exactly, sir.'
'And we have no understudy.'
'Very true, sir.'