Thank You, Jeeves

'Scarcely germane.'

'Quite so, sir.'

'Then carry on, Jeeves.'

'Very good, sir. So in the end, acting upon his own initiative, the constable arrived at the conclusion that as secure a place as any would be the potting-shed, the larger potting-shed ...'

'We understand, Jeeves. The one with the tiled roof

'Precisely, sir. He, therefore, placed Sir Roderick in the larger potting-shed, and remained on guard there throughout the remainder of the night. Some little time ago, the gardeners came on duty and the constable, summoning one of them – a young fellow named ...'

'All right, Jeeves.'

'Very good, sir. Summoning this young fellow, he dispatched him to the temporary residence of Sergeant Voules in the hope that the latter would now be sufficiently restored to be able to interest himself in the matter. Such, it appears, was the case. A night's sleep, acting in conjunction with a naturally robust constitution, had enabled Sergeant Voules to rise at his usual hour and partake of a hearty breakfast.'

'Breakfast!' I couldn't help murmuring in spite of my iron self-control. The word had touched an exposed nerve in Bertram.

'On receiving the communication, Sergeant Voules hastened to the Hall to interview his lordship.'

'Why his lordship?'

'His lordship is a Justice of the Peace, sir.'

'Of course, yes.'

'And, as such, has the power to commit the prisoner to incarceration in a more recognized prison. He is waiting in the library now, m'lord, till your lordship is at leisure to see him.'

If the word 'breakfast' was, as it were, the key word that had the power to set Bertram Wooster a-quiver, it appeared that 'prison' was the one that tickled old Stoker up properly. He uttered a hideous cry.

'But how can he be in prison? What's he got to do with prisons? Why does this fool of a cop think he ought to be in prison?'

'The charge, I understand, sir, is one of burglary.'

'Burglary!'

'Yes, sir.'

Old Stoker looked so piteously at me – why me, I don't know, but he did – that I nearly patted him on the head. In fact, I might quite easily have done so, had not my hand been stayed by a sudden noise in my rear like that made by a frightened hen or a rising pheasant. The Dowager Lady Chuffnell had come charging into the room.

'Marmaduke!' she cried, and I can give no better indication of her emotion than by saying that as she spoke her eyes rested on my face and it made no impression on her whatsoever. For all the notice she took of it, I might have been the Great White Chief. 'Marmaduke, I have the most terrible news. Roderick ...'

'All right,' said Chuffy, a little petulantly, I thought. 'We've had it too. Jeeves is just telling us.'

'But what are we to do?'

'I don't know.'

'And it is all my fault, all my fault.'

'Oh, don't say that, Aunt Myrtle,' said Chuffy, rattled but still preux. 'You couldn't have helped it.'

'I could. I could. I shall never forgive myself. If it had not been for me, he would never have gone out of the house with that black stuff on his face.'

I was really sorry for poor old Stoker. One thing after another, I mean to say. His eyes came out of his head like a snail's.

'Black stuff?' he gurgled faintly.

'He had covered his face with burnt cork to amuse Seabury'

Old Stoker tottered to a chair and sank into it. He seemed to be thinking that this was one of those stories you could listen to better sitting down.

'You can only remove the horrible stuff with butter ...'

'And petrol, so the cognoscenti tell me,' I couldn't help putting in. I like to keep these things straight. 'You support me, Jeeves? Petrol does the trick?'

'Yes, sir.'

'Well, petrol, then. Petrol or butter. At any rate, it was to get something that would take the stuff off that he must have broken into this house. And now...!'

She cheesed it in mid-sentence, deeply moved. Not, however, any more deeply than old Stoker, who seemed to be more or less passing through the furnace.

'This is the finish,' he said, in a sort of pale voice. 'This is where I drop fifty million dollars and try to like it. A lot of use any testimony in a lunacy case is going to be from a fellow who gets himself pinched while wandering around the country in black face. Why, there isn't a judge in America who wouldn't rule out anything he said on the ground that he was crazy himself.'

Lady Chuffnell quivered.

'But he did it to please my son.'

'Anybody who would do anything to please a young hound like that,' said old Stoker, 'must have been crazy.'

He emitted a mirthless laugh.

'Well, the joke's on me, all right. Yes, the joke's certainly on me. I stake everything on the evidence of this man Glossop. I rely on him to save my fifty million by testifying that old George wasn't loco. And two minutes after I've put him on the stand, the other side'll come right back at me by showing that my expert is a loony himself, loonier than ever old George could have been if he'd tried for a thousand years. It's funny when you come to think of it. Ironical. Reminds one of that thing about Lo somebody's name led all the rest.'

Jeeves coughed. He had that informative gleam of his in his eyes.

'Abou ben Adhem, sir.'

'Have I what? said old Stoker, puzzled.

'The poem to which you allude relates to a certain Abou ben Adhem, who, according to the story, awoke one night from a deep dream of peace to find an angel ...'

'Get out!' said old Stoker, very quietly.

'Sir?'

'Get out of this room before I murder you.'

'Yes, sir.'

'And take your angels with you.'

'Very good, sir.'

The door closed. Old Stoker puffed out his breath in a stricken sort of way.

'Angels!' he said. At a time like this!'

I felt it only fair to stick up for Jeeves.

'He was perfectly right,' I said. 'I used to know the thing by heart at school. This cove found an angel sitting by his bed, writing in a book, don't you know, an the upshot of the whole affair was ... Oh, all right, if you don't want to hear.'

I withdrew to a corner of the room and picked up a photograph album. A Wooster does not thrust his conversation upon the unwilling.

From some time after this there was a good deal of what you might call mixed chatter, in which – through dudgeon – I took no part. Everybody talked at once, and nobody said anything that you could have described as being in the least constructive. Except old Stoker, who proved that I had been right in thinking that he must at one time have been a pirate of the Spanish or some other Main by coming boldly out with a suggestion for a rescue party.

'What's the matter,' he wanted to know, 'with going and breaking the door down and getting him out and smuggling him away and hiding him somewhere and letting these darned cops run circles round themselves, trying to find him?'

Chuffy demurred.