Of Thane and Vassal

THE RETURN OF JEEVES (219 pp.)--P. G. Wodehouse--Simon & Schuster ($3.50).

U. S. reading households have been without their favorite gentleman's gentleman for four years and five months. Now Jeeves is back, cool as dry ice and helpful as money in the bank. Old doters will not find The Return of Jeeves the finest vintage Wodehouse, but it is an adequate little yarn to while away the time that TV hasn't killed.

Jeeves is playing vassal to a new thane this time. Scatterbrained Bertie Wooster, for once apprehensive about the economic future of the British upper classes, has packed himself off to a home-economics school to learn all about cooking, sock-mending and polishing his own boots. Jeeves is on internal lend-lease to William, ninth Earl of Towcester, an amiable chap with "a marked shortage of the little gray cells ... It was generally agreed that whoever won the next Nobel Prize, it would not be Bill Towcester."

Bill is in three kinds of jam: 1) as an amateur bookmaker out for some ready cash, he has welshed on a -L-3,000 daily-double payoff, and the man he owes is hot on his trail; 2) he can only honor the debt by selling his moldering ancestral mansion, Towcester Abbey, to an American millionairess who has qualms about its dampness; 3) his fiancee Jill misinterprets his 2 a.m. exit from the millionairess' room and promptly returns his ring. Trusty Jeeves settles these and a dozen other complications with his customary aplomb. Bill and Jill are put back on the cooing road to matrimony, and Jeeves finesses the American millionairess into crating Towcester Abbey, stone by stone, and rebuilding it in Southern California.

As of old, Jeeves is imperturbably ready with a Latin quip ("'Rem acu tetigisti,' which might be rendered by the American colloquialism, 'You said a mouthful' "), historical precedents ("In the words of Pliny the Younger . . .") and unobtrusive counsel ("Had I been aware that your lordship was in the habit of sleeping in mauve pajamas, I would have advised against it"). Author Wodehouse promises not to let this great mind lie fallow for so long again.

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