‘They came out of my bedroom.’
‘Then they were my cats!’ he said sadly. ‘Oh, dash it.’
‘Did you put cats in my bedroom?’
‘Your man, what’s-his-name, did. He rather decently said I could keep them there till my train went. I’d just come to fetch them. And now they’ve gone! Oh, well, it can’t be helped, I suppose. I’ll take the hat and the fish, anyway.’
I was beginning to dislike this chappie.
‘Did you put that bally fish there, too?’
‘No, that was Eustace’s. The hat was Claude’s.’
I sank limply into a chair.
‘I say, you couldn’t explain this, could you?’ I said. The chappie gazed at me in mild surprise.
‘Why, don’t you know all about it? I say!’ He blushed profusely. ‘Why, if you don’t know about it, I shouldn’t wonder if the whole thing didn’t seem rummy to you.’
‘Rummy is the word.’
‘It was for The Seekers, you know?’
‘The Seekers?’
‘Rather a blood club, you know, up at Oxford, which your cousins and I are rather keen on getting into. You have to pinch something, you know, to get elected. Some sort of a souvenir, you know. A policeman’s helmet, you know, or a door-knocker or something, you know. The room’s decorated with the things at the annual dinner, and everybody makes speeches and all that sort of thing. Rather jolly! Well, we wanted rather to make a sort of special effort and do the thing in style, if you understand, so we came up to London to see if we couldn’t pick up something here that would be a bit out of the ordinary. And we had the most amazing luck right from the start. Your cousin Claude managed to collect a quite decent top-hat out of a passing car and your cousin Eustace got away with a really goodish salmon or something from Harrods, and I snaffed three excellent cats all in the first hour. We were fearfully braced, I can tell you. And then the difficulty was to know where to park the things till our train went. You look so beastly conspicuous, you know, tooling about London with a fish and a lot of cats. And then Eustace remembered you, and we all came on here in a cab. You were out, but your man said it would be all right. When we met you, you were in such a hurry that we hadn’t time to explain. Well, I think I’ll be taking the hat, if you don’t mind.’
‘It’s gone.’
‘Gone?’
‘The fellow you pinched it from happened to be the man who was lunching here. He took it away with him.’
‘Oh, I say! Poor old Claude will be upset. Well, how about the goodish salmon or something?’
‘Would you care to view the remains?’ He seemed all broken up when he saw the wreckage.
‘I doubt if the committee would accept that,’ he said sadly. ‘There isn’t a frightful lot of it left, what?’
‘The cats ate the rest.’
He sighed deeply.
‘No cats, no fish, no hat. We’ve had all our trouble for nothing. I do call that hard! And on top of that – I say, I hate to ask you, but you couldn’t lend me a tenner, could you?’
‘A tenner? What for?’
‘Well, the fact is, I’ve got to pop round and bail Claude and Eustace out. They’ve been arrested.’
‘Arrested!’
‘Yes. You see, what with the excitement of collaring the hat and the salmon or something, added to the fact that we had rather a festive lunch, they got a bit above themselves, poor chaps, and tried to pinch a motor-lorry. Silly, of course, because I don’t see how they could have got the thing to Oxford and shown it to the committee. Still, there wasn’t any reasoning with them, and when the driver started making a fuss, there was a bit of a mix-up, and Claude and Eustace are more or less languishing in Vine Street police station till I pop round and bail them out. So if you could manage a tenner – Oh, thanks, that’s fearfully good of you. It would have been too bad to leave them there, what? I mean, they’re both such frightfully good chaps, you know. Everybody likes them up at the Varsity. They’re fearfully popular.’
‘I bet they are!’ I said.
When Jeeves came back, I was waiting for him on the mat. I wanted speech with the blighter.
‘Well?’ I said.
‘Sir Roderick asked me a number of questions, sir, respecting your habits and mode of life, to which I replied guardedly.’
‘I don’t care about that. What I want to know is why you didn’t explain the whole thing to him right at the start? A word from you would have put everything clear.’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘Now he’s gone off thinking me a loony.’
‘I should not be surprised, from his conversation with me, sir, if some such idea had not entered his head.’
I was just starting to speak, when the telephone bell rang. Jeeves answered it.
‘No, madam, Mr Wooster is not in. No, madam, I do not know when he will return. No, madam, he left no message. Yes, madam, I will inform him.’ He put back the receiver. ‘Mrs Gregson, sir.’
Aunt Agatha! I had been expecting it. Ever since the luncheon-party had blown out a fuse, her shadow had been hanging over me, so to speak.
‘Does she know? Already?’
‘I gather that Sir Roderick has been speaking to her on the telephone, sir, and –’
‘No wedding bells for me, what?’
Jeeves coughed.
‘Mrs Gregson did not actually confide in me, sir, but I fancy that some such thing may have occurred. She seemed decidedly agitated, sir.’
It’s a rummy thing, but I’d been so snootered by the old boy and the cats and the fish and the hat and the pink-faced chappie and all the rest of it that the bright side simply hadn’t occurred to me till now. By Jove, it was like a bally weight rolling off my chest! I gave a yelp of pure relief.
‘Jeeves!’ I said, ‘I believe you worked the whole thing!’
‘Sir?’
‘I believe you had the jolly old situation in hand right from the start.’
‘Well, sir, Spenser, Mrs Gregson’s butler, who inadvertently chanced to overhear something of your conversation when you were lunching at the house, did mention certain of the details to me; and I confess that, though it may be a liberty to say so, I entertained hopes that something might occur to prevent the match. I doubt if the young lady was entirely suitable to you, sir.’
‘And she would have shot you out on your ear five minutes after the ceremony.’
‘Yes, sir. Spenser informed me that she had expressed some such intention. Mrs Gregson wishes you to call upon her immediately, sir.’
‘She does, eh? What do you advise, Jeeves?’
‘I think a trip abroad might prove enjoyable, sir.’
I shook my head. ‘She’d come after me.’
‘Not if you went far enough afield, sir. There are excellent boats leaving every Wednesday and Saturday for New York.’
‘Jeeves,’ I said, ‘you are right, as always. Book the tickets.’
9
* * *
A Letter of Introduction
YOU KNOW, THE longer I live, the more clearly I see that half the trouble in this bally world is caused by the light-hearted and thoughtless way in which chappies dash off letters of introduction and hand them to other chappies to deliver to chappies of the third part. It’s one of those things that make you wish you were living in the Stone Age. What I mean to say is, if a fellow in those days wanted to give anyone a letter of introduction, he had to spend a month or so carving it on a large-sized boulder, and the chances were that the other chappie got so sick of lugging the thing round in the hot sun that he dropped it after the first mile. But nowadays it’s so easy to write letters of introduction that everybody does it without a second thought, with the result that some perfectly harmless cove like myself gets in the soup.
Mark you, all the above is what you might call the result of my riper experience. I don’t mind admitting that in the first flush of the thing, so to speak, when Jeeves told me – this would be about three weeks after I’d landed in A
merica – that a blighter called Cyril Bassington-Bassington had arrived and I found that he had brought a letter of introduction to me from Aunt Agatha … where was I? Oh, yes … I don’t mind admitting, I was saying, that just at first I was rather bucked. You see, after the painful events which had resulted in my leaving England I hadn’t expected to get any sort of letter from Aunt Agatha which would pass the censor, so to speak. And it was a pleasant surprise to open this one and find it almost civil. Chilly, perhaps, in parts, but on the whole quite tolerably polite. I looked on the thing as a hopeful sign. Sort of olive branch, you know. Or do I mean orange blossom? What I’m getting at is that the fact that Aunt Agatha was writing to me without calling me names seemed, more or less, like a step in the direction of peace.
And I was all for peace, and that right speedily. I’m not saying a word against New York, mind you. I liked the place, and was having quite a ripe time there. But the fact remains that a fellow who’s been used to London all his life does get a trifle homesick on a foreign strand, and I wanted to pop back to the cosy old flat in Berkeley Street – which could only be done when Aunt Agatha had simmered down and got over the Glossop episode. I know that London is a biggish city, but, believe me, it isn’t half big enough for any fellow to live in with Aunt Agatha when she’s after him with the old hatchet. And so I’m bound to say I looked on this chump Bassington-Bassington, when he arrived, more or less as a Dove of Peace, and was all for him.
He would seem from contemporary accounts to have blown in one morning at seven-forty-five, that being the ghastly sort of hour they shoot you off the liner in New York. He was given the respectful raspberry by Jeeves, and told to try again about three hours later, when there would be a sporting chance of my having sprung from my bed with a glad cry to welcome another day and all that sort of thing. Which was rather decent of Jeeves, by the way, for it so happened that there was a slight estrangement, a touch of coldness, a bit of a row in other words, between us at the moment because of some rather priceless purple socks which I was wearing against his wishes: and a lesser man might easily have snatched at the chance of getting back at me a bit by loosing Cyril into my bedchamber at a moment when I couldn’t have stood a two-minutes’ conversation with my dearest pal. For until I have had my early cup of tea and have brooded on life for a bit absolutely undisturbed, I’m not much of a lad for the merry chit-chat.
So Jeeves very sportingly shot Cyril out into the crisp morning air, and didn’t let me know of his existence till he brought his card in with the Bohea.
‘And what might all this be, Jeeves?’ I said, giving the thing the glassy gaze.
‘The gentleman has arrived from England, I understand, sir. He called to see you earlier in the day.’
‘Good Lord, Jeeves! You don’t mean to say the day starts earlier than this?’
‘He desired me to say he would return later, sir.’
‘I’ve never heard of him. Have you ever heard of him, Jeeves?’
‘I am familiar with the name Bassington-Bassington, sir. There are three branches of the Bassington-Bassington family – the Shropshire Bassington-Bassingtons, the Hampshire Bassington-Bassingtons, and the Kent Bassington-Bassingtons.’
‘England seems pretty well stocked up with Bassington-Bassingtons.’
‘Tolerably so, sir.’
‘No chance of a sudden shortage, I mean, what?’
‘Presumably not, sir.’
‘And what sort of a specimen is this one?’
‘I could not say, sir, on such short acquaintance.’
‘Will you give me a sporting two to one, Jeeves, judging from what you have seen of him, that this chappie is not a blighter or an excrescence?’
‘No, sir. I should not care to venture such liberal odds.’
‘I knew it. Well, the only thing that remains to be discovered is what kind of a blighter he is.’
‘Time will tell, sir. The gentleman brought a letter for you, sir.’
‘Oh, he did, did he?’ I said, and grasped the communication. And then I recognized the handwriting. ‘I say, Jeeves, this is from my Aunt Agatha!’
‘Indeed, sir?’
‘Don’t dismiss it in that light way. Don’t you see what this means? She says she wants me to look after this excrescence while he’s in New York. By Jove, Jeeves, if I only fawn on him a bit, so that he sends back a favourable report to headquarters, I may yet be able to get back to England in time for Goodwood. Now is certainly the time for all good men to come to the aid of the party, Jeeves. We must rally round and cosset this cove in no uncertain manner.’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘He isn’t going to stay in New York long,’ I said, taking another look at the letter. ‘He’s headed for Washington. Going to give the nibs there the once-over, apparently, before taking a whirl at the Diplomatic Service. I should say that we can win this lad’s esteem and affection with a lunch and a couple of dinners, what?’
‘I fancy that should be entirely adequate, sir.’
‘This is the jolliest thing that’s happened since we left England. It looks to me as if the sun were breaking through the clouds.’
‘Very possibly, sir.’
He started to put out my things, and there was an awkward sort of silence.
‘Not those socks, Jeeves,’ I said, gulping a bit but having a dash at the careless, off-hand tone. ‘Give me the purple ones.’
‘I beg your pardon, sir?’
‘Those jolly purple ones.’
‘Very good, sir.’
He lugged them out of the drawer as if he were a vegetarian fishing a caterpillar out of the salad. You could see he was feeling deeply. Deuced painful and all that, this sort of thing, but a chappie has got to assert himself every now and then. Absolutely.
I was looking for Cyril to show up again any time after breakfast, but he didn’t appear: so towards one o’clock I trickled out to the Lambs Club, where I had an appointment to feed the Wooster face with a cove of the name of Caffyn I’d got pally with since my arrival – George Caffyn, a fellow who wrote plays and what not. I’d made a lot of friends during my stay in New York, the city being crammed with bonhomous lads who one and all extended a welcoming hand to the stranger in their midst.
Caffyn was a bit late, but bobbed up finally, saying that he had been kept at a rehearsal of his new musical comedy, Ask Dad; and we started in. We had just reached the coffee, when the waiter came up and said that Jeeves wanted to see me.
Jeeves was in the waiting-room. He gave the socks one pained look as I came in, then averted his eyes.
‘Mr Bassington-Bassington has just telephoned, sir.’
‘Oh?’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘Where is he?’
‘In prison, sir.’
I reeled against the wallpaper. A nice thing to happen to Aunt Agatha’s nominee on his first morning under my wing, I did not think!
‘In prison!’
‘Yes, sir. He said on the telephone that he had been arrested and would be glad if you could step round and bail him out.’
‘Arrested! What for?’
‘He did not favour me with his confidence in that respect, sir.’
‘This is a bit thick, Jeeves.’
‘Precisely, sir.’
I collected old George, who very decently volunteered to stagger along with me, and we hopped into a taxi. We sat around at the police station for a bit on a wooden bench in a sort of ante-room, and presently a policeman appeared, leading in Cyril.
‘Hallo! Hallo! Hallo!’ I said. ‘What?’
My experience is that a fellow never really looks his best just after he’s come out of a cell. When I was up at Oxford, I used to have a regular job bailing out a pal of mine who never failed to get pinched every Boat Race night, and he always looked like something that had been dug up by the roots. Cyril was in pretty much the same sort of shape. He had a black eye and a torn collar, and altogether was nothing to write home about – especially if one was wri
ting to Aunt Agatha. He was a thin, tall chappie with a lot of light hair and pale-blue goggly eyes which made him look like one of the rarer kinds of fish.
‘I got your message,’ I said.
‘Oh, are you Bertie Wooster?’
‘Absolutely. And this is my pal George Caffyn. Writes plays and what not, don’t you know.’
We all shook hands, and the policeman, having retrieved a piece of chewing-gum from the underside of a chair, where he had parked it against a rainy day, went off into a corner and began to contemplate the infinite.
‘This is a rotten country,’ said Cyril.
‘Oh, I don’t know, you know, don’t you know!’ I said.
‘We do our best,’ said George.
‘Old George is an American,’ I explained. ‘Writes plays, don’t you know, and what not.’
‘Of course, I didn’t invent the country,’ said George. ‘That was Columbus. But I shall be delighted to consider any improvements you may suggest and lay them before the proper authorities.’
‘Well, why don’t the policemen in New York dress properly?’
George took a look at the chewing officer across the room.
‘I don’t see anything missing,’ he said.
‘I mean to say, why don’t they they wear helmets like they do in London? Why do they look like postmen? It isn’t fair on a fellow. Makes it dashed confusing. I was simply standing on the pavement, looking at things, when a fellow who looked like a postman prodded me in the ribs with a club. I didn’t see why I should have postmen prodding me. Why the dickens should a fellow come three thousand miles to be prodded by postmen?’
‘The point is well taken,’ said George. ‘What did you do?’
‘I gave him a shove, you know. I’ve got a frightfully hasty temper, you know. All the Bassington-Bassingtons have got frightfully hasty tempers, don’t you know! And then he biffed me in the eye and tugged me off to this beastly place.’
‘I’ll fix it, old son,’ I said. And I hauled out the bank-roll and went off to open negotiations, leaving Cyril to talk to George. I don’t mind admitting that I was a bit perturbed. There were furrows in the old brow, and I had a kind of foreboding feeling. As long as this chump stayed in New York, I was responsible for him: and he didn’t give me the impression of being the species of cove a reasonable chappie would care to be responsible for for more than about three minutes.