“I am afraid I am a little late,” he said, as we sat down. “I was detained at my club by Lord Alastair Hungerford[123], the Duke of Ramfurline’s son[124]. His Grace, he informed me, had exhibited a renewal of the symptoms. I could not leave him immediately. I hope that my unpunctuality has not discommoded you.”
“Oh, not at all. So the Duke is off his rocker[125], what?”
“The expression which you use is not precisely the one I should have employed myself with reference to the head of perhaps the noblest family in England, but there is no doubt that cerebral excitement does, as you suggest, exist in no small degree.” He sighed as well as he could with his mouth full of cutlet. “A profession like mine is a great strain, a great strain.”
“Must be.”
“Sometimes I am terrified at what I see around me.” He stopped suddenly. “Do you keep a cat, Mr Wooster?”
“Eh? What? Cat? No, no cat.”
“I am sure that I heard a cat mewing either in the room or very near to where we are sitting.”
“Probably a taxi or something in the street.”
“I fear I do not follow you.”
“I mean to say, taxis squawk, you know. Rather like cats.”
“I had not observed the resemblance,” he said, rather coldly.
“Have some lemon-squash,” I said.
The conversation seemed to be getting rather difficult.
“Thank you. Half a glassful, if I may.” This hellish drink appeared to give him force. “I have a particular dislike for cats. But I was saying—Oh, yes. Sometimes I am terrified at what I see around me. It is not only the cases which come under my professional notice. It is what I see as I go about London. Sometimes it seems to me that the whole world is mentally unbalanced. This very morning, for example, a most singular and distressing occurrence took place as I was driving from my house to the club. It was a fine day, I had instructed my chauffeur to open my laudaulette[126], and I was leaning back, deriving pleasure from the sunshine, when our progress was arrested in the middle of the road by one of those blocks in the traffic which are inevitable in London.”
I had a feeling that I was listening to a lecture and was expected to say something.
“Bravo, bravo!” I said.
“I beg your pardon?”
“Nothing, nothing. You were saying—”
“I had fallen into a meditation, when suddenly the most extraordinary thing took place. My hat was snatched abruptly from my head! And as I looked back I noticed it on somebody’s head, which soon disappeared.”
I didn’t laugh, of course, I did my best.
“It must have been a joke,” I said.
This suggestion didn’t seem to please the old man.
“I think,” he said, “I can understand the humorous, but this action was beyond all comprehension. It was done by a mentally unbalanced subject! These mental lesions may express themselves in almost any form. The Duke of Ramfurline is under the impression—this is in the strictest confidence—that he is a canary… Mr Wooster, there is a cat here! It is not in the street! The mewing is coming from the next room.”
This time I heard the mewing myself, there was no doubt about it. There was a distinct sound of mewing coming from the next room. I punched the bell for Jeeves, who drifted in and stood waiting with an air of respectful devotion.
“Sir?”
“Oh, Jeeves,” I said. “Cats! What about it? Are there any cats in the flat?”
“Only the three in your bedroom, sir.”
“What!”
“Cats in his bedroom!” I heard Sir Roderick whisper. His eyes hit me like a couple of bullets.
“What do you mean,” I said, “only the three in my bedroom?”
“The black one, the tabby and the small lemoncoloured animal, sir.”
“What on earth …[127]”
I ran round the table in the direction of the door. Unfortunately, Sir Roderick had just decided to do the same. So we collided in the doorway, and staggered out into the hall together. He grabbed an umbrella from the rack.
“Stand back!” he shouted, waving it overhead. “Stand back, sir! I am armed!”
“Awfully sorry, sir,” I said. “I was just going out to have a look into things.”
He lowered the umbrella. But just then the most frightful cry started in the bedroom. It sounded as though all the cats in London, assisted by delegates from outlying suburbs, had got together. A sort of augmented orchestra of cats.
“This noise is unendurable,” yelled Sir Roderick. “I cannot hear myself speak.”
“I think, sir,” said Jeeves respectfully, “that the animals may have become somewhat exhilarated as the result of having discovered the fish under Mr Wooster’s bed.”
The old man whispered:
“Fish! Did I hear you rightly?”
“Sir?”
“Did you say that there was a fish under Mr Wooster’s bed?”
“Yes, sir.”
Sir Roderick moaned, and reached for his hat and stick.
“You aren’t going?” I said.
“Mr Wooster, I am going! I prefer to spend my leisure time in less eccentric society.”
“But I say. Here, I must come with you. I’m sure the whole business can be explained. Jeeves, my hat.”
Jeeves gave me the hat. I took it from him and shoved it on my head.
“Good heavens!”
Beastly shock it was! The hat was absolutely enormous.
“I say! This isn’t my hat!”
“It is my hat!” said Sir Roderick in the coldest, nastiest voice I’d ever heard. “The hat which was stolen from me this morning as I drove in my car.”
“But—”
I suppose Napoleon or somebody like that would have decided the problem, but I’m bound to say it was too much for me. I just stood there goggling in a sort of coma, while the old man lifted the hat off me and turned to Jeeves.
“I should be glad, my man,” he said, “if you would accompany me a few yards down the street. I wish to ask you some questions.”
“Very good, sir.”
“Here, but, I say—!” I began, but he left me standing. He went out, followed by Jeeves. And at that moment the row in the bedroom started again, louder than ever.
Cats in your bedroom—that’s enough! I decided that they weren’t going to stay there any longer. I opened the door. It seemed to me that about a hundred and fifteen cats of all sizes and colours ran past me; and all that was left was the head of a big fish, lying on the carpet and staring up at me, as if it wanted a written explanation and apology.
I withdrew on tiptoe and shut the door. And, as I did so, I bumped into[128] someone.
“Oh, sorry!” he said.
I spun round. It was the pink-faced fellow, Lord Something or other, the fellow I had met with Claude and Eustace.
“I say,” he said apologetically, “awfully sorry to bother you, but those weren’t my cats I met just now legging it downstairs, were they? They looked like my cats.”
“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[129], I suppose. I’ll take the hat and the fish, anyway.”