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 looney.”
“I should not be surprised, from his conversation with me, sir, if some such idea had not entered his head.”
I was just starting in 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.”
Jeeves and the Chump Cyril
You know, the longer I live, the more clearly I see that half the trouble in this bally world is caused by the lighthearted 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 America—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
