8

Sir Roderick Comes to Lunch

I had met Sir Roderick Glossop before, of course, but only when I was with Honoria; and Honoria makes almost anybody you meet in the same room undersized and trivial by comparison. I had never realized till this moment what an extraordinarily formidable man he was. He had a pair of shaggy eyebrows; he was fairly tall and fairly broad, and he had the most enormous head, with practically no hair on it, which made it seem bigger and much more like the dome of St Paul’s. I suppose his hat-size was nine or something. It shows what a stupid thing it is to develop your brain too much.

“Hello! Hello! Hello!” I said, trying to be cordial, and then had a sudden feeling that that was just the sort of thing I had been warned not to say. It is very difficult to start the conversation an occasion like this. A fellow living in a London flat is so handicapped. I mean to say, if I had the visitor in the country, I could have said, “Welcome to Meadowsweet Hall!” or something like that. It sounds silly to say “Welcome to Number 6A, Crichton Mansions, Berkeley Street, W.”

“I am afraid I am a little late,” he said, as we sat down. “I was detained at my club by Lord Alastair Hungerford, the Duke of Ramfurline’s son. 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, 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, 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 …”

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 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, I suppose. I’ll take the hat and the fish, anyway.”

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, 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, 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 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.”