“Where is he?”

“In prison, sir.”

I reeled against the wallpaper. A nice thing to happen to Aunt Agatha’s nominee on his first morning under my wing, I did not think!

“In prison!”

“Yes, sir. He said on the telephone that he had been arrested and would be glad if you could step round and bail him out.”

“Arrested! What for?”

“He did not favour me with his confidence in that respect, sir.”

“This is a bit thick, Jeeves.”

“Precisely, sir.”

I collected old George, who very decently volunteered to stagger along with me, and we hopped into a taxi. We sat around at the police-station for a bit on a wooden bench in a sort of ante-room, and presently a policeman appeared, leading in Cyril.

“Halloa! Halloa! Halloa!” I said. “What?”

My experience is that a fellow never really looks his best just after he’s come out of a cell. When I was up at Oxford, I used to have a regular job bailing out a pal of mine who never failed to get pinched every Boat-Race night, and he always looked like something that had been dug up by the roots. Cyril was in pretty much the same sort of shape. He had a black eye and a torn collar, and altogether was nothing to write home about—especially if one was writing to Aunt Agatha. He was a thin, tall chappie with a lot of light hair and pale-blue goggly eyes which made him look like one of the rarer kinds of fish.

“I got your message,” I said.

“Oh, are you Bertie Wooster?”

“Absolutely. And this is my pal George Caffyn. Writes plays and what not, don’t you know.”

We all shook hands, and the policeman, having retrieved a piece of chewing-gum from the underside of a chair, where he had parked it against a rainy day, went off into a corner and began to contemplate the infinite.

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