by the excitement of the thing and start bringing in coffee.”
“No, sir.”
“And don’t let your eyes get glassy, because, if you do, you’re apt to find yourself in a padded cell before you know where you are.”
“Very good, sir.”
There was a ring at the bell.
“Stand by, Jeeves,” I said. “We’re off!”
I HAD met Sir Roderick Glossop before, of course, but only when I was with Honoria: and there is something about Honoria which makes almost anybody you meet in the same room seem sort of under-sized and trivial by comparison. I had never realized till this moment what an extraordinarily formidable old bird he was. He had a pair of shaggy eyebrows which gave his eyes a piercing look which was not at all the sort of thing a fellow wanted to encounter on an empty stomach. 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 he must have taken about a nine or something in hats. Shows what a rotten thing it is to let your brain develop too much.
“What ho! What ho! What ho!” I said, trying to strike the genial note, and then had a sudden feeling that that was just the sort of thing I had been warned not to say. Dashed difficult it is to start things going properly on an occasion like this. A fellow living in a London flat is so handicapped. I mean to say, if I had been the young squire greeting the visitor in the country, I could have said “Welcome to Meadowsweet Hall!” or something zippy 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 which have been causing the family so much concern. I could not leave him immediately. Hence my unpunctuality, which I trust 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 appalled at what I see around me.” He stopped suddenly and sort of stiffened. “Do you keep a cat, Mr. Wooster?”
“Eh? What? Cat? No, no cat.”
“I was conscious of a distinct impression that I had 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 in a sort of way.”
“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.” The hell-brew appeared to buck him up, for he resumed in a slightly more pally manner. “I have a particular dislike for cats. But I was saying—— Oh, yes. Sometimes I am positively appalled at what I see around me. It is not only the cases which come under my professional notice, painful as many of those are. 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. The day being clement, I had instructed my chauffeur to open my landaulette, and I was leaning back, deriving no little pleasure from the sunshine, when our progress was arrested in the middle of the thoroughfare by one of those blocks in the traffic which are inevitable in so congested a system as that of London.”
I suppose I had been letting my mind wander a bit, for when he stopped and took a sip of lemon-squash I had a feeling that I was listening to a lecture and was expected to say something.
“Hear, hear!” I said.
“I beg your pardon?”
“Nothing, nothing. You were saying——”
“The vehicles proceeding in the opposite direction had also been temporarily arrested, but after a moment they were permitted to proceed. 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 perceived it being waved in a kind of feverish triumph from the interior of a taxi-cab, which, even as I looked, disappeared through a gap in the traffic and was lost to sight.”
I didn’t laugh, but I distinctly heard a couple of my floating ribs part from their moorings under the strain.
“Must have been meant for a practical joke,” I said. “What?”
This suggestion didn’t seem to please the old boy.
“I trust,” he said, “I am not deficient in an appreciation of the humorous, but I confess that I am at a loss to detect anything akin to pleasantry in the outrage. The action was beyond all question that of a mentally unbalanced subject. These mental lesions may express themselves in almost any form. The Duke of Ramfurline, to whom I had occasion to allude just now, is under the impression—this is in the strictest confidence—that he is a canary; and his seizure to-day, which so perturbed Lord Alastair, was due to the fact that a careless footman had neglected to bring him his morning lump of sugar. Cases are common, again, of men waylaying women and cutting off portions of their hair. It is from a branch of this latter form of mania that I should be disposed to imagine that my assailant was suffering. I can only trust that he will be placed under proper control before he—— Mr. Wooster, there is a cat close at hand! It is not in the street! The mewing appears to come from the adjoining room.”
THIS time I had to admit 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 in a kind of stricken way, and his eyes hit me amidships 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 lemon-coloured animal, sir.”
“What on earth——?”
I charged round the table in the direction of the door. Unfortunately, Sir Roderick had just decided to edge in that direction himself, with the result that we collided in the doorway with a good deal of force, and staggered out into the hall together. He came smartly out of the clinch and grabbed an umbrella from the rack.
“Stand back!” he shouted, waving it over his head. “Stand back, sir! I am armed!”
It seemed to me that the moment had come to be soothing.
“Awfully sorry I barged into you,” I said. “Wouldn’t have had it happen for worlds. I was just dashing out to have a look into things.”
He appeared a trifle reassured, and lowered the umbrella. But just then the most frightful shindy started in the bedroom. It sounded as though all the cats in London, assisted by delegates from outlying suburbs, had got together to settle their differences once for all. A sort of augmented orchestra of cats.
“This noise is unendurable,”