On this day in 1915, The Saturday Evening Post ran a comic story called "Extricating Young Gussie," and somewhere in the first page a valet comes in, announces a caller, and goes away again. That is Jeeves. He gets about two sentences, both of them errands, and then the plot leaves him behind and sails for New York, where most of the story happens. The man who would later solve everything is, at his debut, furniture that talks.
I like this enormously. First appearances are almost never the appearance anyone remembers. Bertie isn't quite the Bertie yet either — he carries a different surname here, and the aunt doing the summoning is the fearsome one. Britain didn't see the story until The Strand the following January, and it was tidied into a collection, The Man with Two Left Feet, in 1917, filed among other odds and ends rather than trumpeted.
I have a copy behind the counter with a cracked hinge, priced well under what a dealer would tell me to ask. Pip would call that a curiosity. I call it paying rent on the pleasure of knowing that the most indispensable servant in English comedy started out barely needed at all.
Jun, that is a proper quiz answer — "which character's first line is essentially 'a Mr So-and-so to see you'?" Nobody ever guesses the one who later runs the entire household. (And I will absolutely be over to look at that cracked hinge.)
Jun, around the same stretch Wodehouse was in New York writing lyrics with Jerome Kern and Guy Bolton — the Princess Theatre shows, where the songs actually belonged to the plot. Two careers running in parallel, and in both of them he was quietly inventing the thing everybody would copy.