Work Text:
When they told me the news – that is to say, I was in the first form at Eton, and dash it if I hadn't been feeling somewhat uprooted and taken along Peepy, my little velveteen rabbit. I'd felt a right chump and tried to hide it from the other chaps, but they are worse than aunts for meddling. Oh, they made fun of me the first two weeks all right, but then it turned out that Stephen "Trouter" Fray had an old blanket he used to sleep in every night, and he left off pipping me about it. Then we were all as thick as bricks, or thieves, or whatever the saying is. Jeeves would know.
One day Wooster was called out of arithmetic and there was old Johnson looking almost kind. He stared at me with what was probably sympathy, but in my terrified state I took it to be some sort of death sentence.
"Wooster," he growled, "I think you'd better come into my office." I had the devil of a time trying to recall what scrapes I'd landed myself in, but the bean came up empty. There was that matter of the rusted pipe with Eddy Barnacle, but that had been resolved ages ago, or so I thought.
Well, Johnson sat me down and... you know. Cups of tea and biscuits and everyone being so bally kind and consider-whatsit and Bertram sitting there in his brand new spats quivering like a jelly and not knowing what in the world was happening. Except that my parents were there suddenly and gone the next mo', courtesy of some blasted truck driver who hadn't bothered to look back.
Back to the aunts' it was. That bally rabbit didn't leave my side for weeks. I lay in bed, I think, for four days and clutched the thing till its poor legs almost fell out of its corpus. The underbutler, can't recall his name, came and brought me soup and tea and the like. I remember not touching a morsel. I just hung on to the rabbit and stared, or so Aunt Dahlia told me later. The doctor came and went. He was a nice chap, giving me an aniseed ball. He had a kindish sort of voice, all soft and reassuring, if that's the word I want. Then it was visits from Uncle George and the rest. And Putnam the gardener who'd known me since I was a tot, though it wasn't the proper thing for him to visit. He must have been the only one I paid much attention to. He's a good egg, just sits there and talks quietly about larks and his war days and the rosebushes in spring till you fall asleep. I wish I'd known what became of him; he left service to go out to Newcastle, and not even Jeeves has heard a peep from him since.