You came up before me once.” I bowed slightly. “But not twice. Good! Learned your lesson, eh? Going straight now? Good. Now, let me see, what was it? Don’t tell me. Of course, yes. Bag-snatching[34].”
“No, no. It was—”
“Bag-snatching,” he repeated firmly. “I remember it distinctly. Still, it’s all past, eh? We live a new life, don’t we? Splendid. Roderick[35], come over here. This is most interesting.”
His friends, who had been examining a salver, put it down and joined us. He was about seven feet in height, and about six feet across, he caught the eye and arrested it. It was as if Nature had intended to make a gorilla, and had changed its mind at the last moment.
His gaze was keen and piercing. I don’t know if you have even seen those pictures in the papers of Dictators with blazing eyes, inflaming the populace with fiery words, but that was what he reminded me of.
“Roderick,” said old Bassett, “I want you to meet this fellow. Here is a case which illustrates exactly what I have so often said—that prison life does not degrade, that it does not warp the character and prevent a man rising on stepping-stones of his dead self to higher things.”
I recognized the gag—one of Jeeves’s—and wondered where he could have heard it.
“Look at this chap. I gave him three months not long ago for snatching bags at railway stations, and it is quite evident that his term in jail has had the most excellent effect on him. He has reformed.”
“Oh, yes?” said the Dictator. I didn’t like the way he spoke. He was looking at me with a nasty sort of supercilious expression.
“What makes you think he has reformed?”
“Of course he has reformed. Look at him. Well groomed, well dressed, a decent member of Society. What his present walk in life is, I do not know, but it is perfectly obvious that he is no longer stealing bags. What are you doing now, young man?”
“Stealing umbrellas, apparently,” said the Dictator. “I notice he’s got yours.”
I was going to deny the accusation hotly—I had, indeed, already opened my lips to do so—when I remembered that I had come out without my umbrella, and yet here I was, beyond any question of doubt, had one! What had caused me to take up the one that had been leaning against a seventeenth-century chair, I cannot say, unless it was the primeval instinct which makes a man without an umbrella reach out for the nearest one in sight, like a flower groping toward the sun.
“I say, I’m most frightfully sorry.”
Old Bassett said he was, too, sorry and disappointed. He said it was this sort of thing that made a man sick at heart. The Dictator asked if he should call a policeman, and old Bassett’s eyes gleamed for a moment. A magistrate loves the idea of calling policemen. It’s like a tiger tasting blood. But he shook his head.
“No, Roderick. I couldn’t. Not today—the happiest day of my life.”
The Dictator pursed his lips, as if feeling that the better the day, the better the deed.
“But listen,” I said, “it was a mistake.”
“Ha!” said the Dictator. “I thought that umbrella was mine.”
“That,” said old Bassett, “is the fundamental trouble with you, my man. You are totally unable to distinguish between mine and yours. Well, I am not going to have you arrested this time, but I advise you to be very careful. Come, Roderick.”
They went out, the Dictator pausing at the door to give me another look and say “Ha!” again. The proprietor of the shop emerged from the inner room, accompanied by a rich smell of stew, and enquired what he could do for me. I said that I knew that he had an eighteenth-century cow-creamer for sale.
He shook his head.
“You’re too late. It’s promised to a customer.”
“Name of Travers?”
“Ah.”
“Then that’s all right. That Travers is my uncle. He sent me here to have a look at the thing. So dig it out, will you? I expect it’s rotten.”
“It’s a beautiful cow-creamer.”
“Ha!” I said, “That’s what you think. We shall see.”
It was a silver cow. But when I say “cow”, don’t think about some decent, self-respecting animal such as you may observe loading grass into itself in the nearest meadow. This was a sinister, leering, underworld sort of animal. It was about four inches high and six long. Its back opened on a hinge[36]. Its tail was arched, so that the tip touched the spine—thus, I suppose, affording a handle for the creamlover to grasp. The sight of it seemed to take me into a different and dreadful world.
It was, consequently, an easy task for me to carry out the programme indicated by Aunt Dahlia. I curled the lip and clicked the tongue, all in one movement. I also drew in the breath sharply.
“Oh, tut, tut, tut!” I said, “Oh, dear, dear, dear! Oh, no, no, no, no, no! I don’t think much of this,” I said, curling and clicking freely. “All wrong.”
“All wrong?”
“All wrong. Modern Dutch.”
“Modern Dutch? What do you mean, Modern Dutch? It’s eighteenth-century English. Look at the hallmark.”
“I can’t see any hallmark.”
“Are you blind? Here, take it outside in the street. It’s lighter there.”
“Right,” I said, and started for the door, like a connoisseur a bit bored at having his time wasted. I had only taken a couple of steps when I tripped over[37] the cat, and shot out of the door like someone wanted by the police. The cow-creamer flew from my hands, and it was a lucky thing that I happened to barge into a fellow citizen outside. Well, not absolutely lucky, as a matter of fact, for it turned out to be Sir Watkyn Bassett. He stood there goggling at me with horror and indignation behind the pince-nez. First, bag-snatching; then umbrella-pinching; and now this. It was the last straw[38].
“Call a policeman, Roderick!” he cried.
The Dictator bawled: “Police!”
“Police!” yipped old Bassett, up in the tenor clef.
“Police!” roared the Dictator, taking the bass. And a moment later something large loomed up in the fog and said: “What’s all this?”
Well, I didn’t want to stick around and explain. I picked up the feet and was gone like the wind. A voice shouted “Stop!” but of course I didn’t. I legged it down byways and along side streets, and eventually fetched up somewhere in the neighbourhood of Sloane Square[39]. There I got aboard a cab and started back to civilization.
My original intention was to drive to the Drones and get a bite of lunch there, but I hadn’t gone far when I realized that I wasn’t equal to it. Changing my strategy, I told the man to take me to the nearest Turkish bath.
I returned to the flat late. It was, indeed, practically with a merry tra-la-la on my lips that I made for the sitting room. And the next I saw a pile of telegrams on the table.
Two
I had had the idea at first glance that there were about twenty of the telegrams, but a closer scrutiny revealed only three. They all bore the same signature. They ran as follows:
The first:
Wooster, Berkeley Mansions, Berkeley Square[40], London.
Come