I was beginning to dislike this fellow.
“Did you put that fish there, too?”
“No, that was Eustace’s. The hat was Claude’s.”
I sank into a chair.
“I say, you couldn’t explain this, could you?” I said. The fellow 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 seemed strange to you.”
“Strange! You call it strange!”
“It was for The Seekers, you know?”
“The Seekers?”
“It’s a club at Oxford, which your cousins and I like very much. You have to steal 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 hat out of a passing car and your cousin Eustace got away with a really good salmon or something from Harrods[130], and I got three excellent cats all in the first hour. We were lucky, I can tell you. And then the difficulty was where to park the things till our train went. You look so conspicuous, you know, walking in 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 take the hat, if you don’t mind.’
“It’s gone.”
“Gone?”
“The fellow you took 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 salmon?”
“Would you like 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.
“The cats ate the rest.”
He sighed deeply.
“No cats, no fish, no hat. We’ve had all our trouble for nothing. And I say, I hate to ask you, but you couldn’t lend me a tenner[131], could you?”
“A tenner? What for?”
“Well, the fact is, Claude and Eustace have been arrested.”
“Arrested!”
“Yes. You see, they tried to steal a lorry. Silly, of course, because I don’t see how they could have got the thing to Oxford and shown it to the committee. Anyway, when the driver had seen them, there was a fight, and Claude and Eustace are in Vine Street police station[132] at the moment. So if you could manage a tenner—Oh, thanks, that’s very good of you. It would have been too bad to leave them there, right? I mean, they’re both such good chaps, you know. Everybody likes them at the University. 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.
“Does she know? Already?”
“I think that Sir Roderick has been speaking to her on the telephone, sir, and—”
“No wedding bells for me, right?”
Jeeves coughed.
“Looks like, sir. Mrs Gregson seemed decidedly agitated, sir.”
I have understood my good luck!
“Jeeves!” I said, “I believe you worked the whole thing!”
“Sir?”
“I believe you had the situation in hand right from the start.”
“Well, sir, Spenser, Mrs Gregson’s butler, who overheard something of your conversation when you were lunching at the house, mentioned certain of the details to me; and I confess that, though it may be a liberty to say so, I hoped that something might occur to prevent the event. I doubt if the young lady was entirely suitable to you, sir.”
“And she would have driven you out five minutes after the ceremony.”
“Yes, sir. Spenser informed me that she had expressed 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 be enjoyable, sir.”
I shook my head. “She’d come after me.”
“Not if you went far enough, 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[133]
You know, the longer I live, the more clearly I see that half the trouble in this world is caused by the thoughtless way in which fellows write letters of introduction and hand them to other fellows to deliver to fellows of the third part. It’s one of those things that make you wish you were living in the Stone Age. 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 suffers.
All the above is what you might call the result of my experience. When Jeeves told me—this would be about three weeks after I’d landed in America—that a blighter called Bassington-Bassington[134] had arrived and I found that he had brought a letter of introduction to me from Aunt Agatha … where was I? Oh, yes … You see, after the painful events which had resulted in my leaving England I hadn’t expected to get any letters from Aunt Agatha. 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. This was a hopeful sign. Sort of an olive branch, you know. Or do I mean orange blossom?
I’m not saying a word against New York, mind you. I liked the place, and was having quite a good time there. But the fact remains that a fellow who’s lived in London all his life gets a homesick on a foreign strand, and I wanted to come back to my old flat in Berkeley Street—which could only be done when Aunt Agatha had forgotten the Glossop episode. I know that London is a big city, but, believe me, it isn’t big enough for any fellow to live in with Aunt Agatha. 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.
He arrived in one morning at seven-forty-five. Jeeves told him to try again about three hours later. Which was rather decent of Jeeves, by the way, for it so happened that there was a slight estrangement between us at the moment because of some rather priceless purple socks which I was wearing against his wishes.
So Jeeves brought his card in with my morning tea.
“And what might all this be, Jeeves?” I asked.