The inimitable Jeeves

absolutely chilled me, and 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 chappie, 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 chappie.
    ‘Did you put that bally fish there, too?’
    ‘No, that was Eustace’s. The hat was Claude’s.’
    I sank limply into a chair.
    ‘I say, you couldn’t explain this, could you?’ I said. The chappie 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 didn’t seem rummy to you.’
    ‘Rummy is the word.’
    ‘It was for The Seekers, you know?’
    ‘The Seekers?’
    ‘Rather a blood club, you know, up at Oxford, which your cousins and I are rather keen on getting into. You have to pinch 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 quite decent top-hat out of a passing car and your cousin Eustace got away with a really goodish salmon or something from Harrods, and I snaffed three excellent cats all in the first hour. We were fearfully braced, I can tell you. And then the difficulty was to know where to park the things till our train went. You look so beastly conspicuous, you know, tooling about 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 be taking the hat, if you don’t mind.’
    ‘It’s gone.’
    ‘Gone?’
    ‘The fellow you pinched 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 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