Free The inimitable Jeeves by P.G. Wodehouse Page B

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 laudaulette, 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 taxicab, 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