Mulliner Nights by P.G. Wodehouse Page A

sap his morale pretty considerably. With a couple of quick
cold ones under his vest, Mervyn would, no doubt, have faced the situation and
carried it off with an air. He would have raised his eyebrows. He would have
been nonchalant and lit a Murad. But, coming on him in his reduced condition,
this fearful screech unnerved him completely.
    The duchess
had now begun to cry ‘Stop thief!’ and Mervyn, most injudiciously, instead of
keeping his head and leaping carelessly into a passing taxi, made the grave
strategic error of picking up his feet with a jerk and starting to run along
Piccadilly.
    Well,
naturally, that did him no good at all. Eight hundred people appeared from
nowhere, willing hands gripped his collar and the seat of his trousers, and the
next thing he knew he was cooling off in Vine Street Police Station.
    After that,
everything was more or less of a blur. The scene seemed suddenly to change to a
police-court, in which he was confronted by a magistrate who looked like an owl
with a dash of weasel blood in him.
    A dialogue
then-took place, of which all he recalls is this:
     
    POLICEMAN : ‘Earing cries of ‘Stop thief!’ your
worship, and observing the accused running very ‘earty, I apprehended ‘im.
    MAGISTRATE : How did he appear, when
apprehended?
    POLICEMAN : Very apprehensive, your worship.
    MAGISTRATE : You mean he had a sort of pinched
look?
    (Laughter in
court.)
    POLICEMAN : It then transpired that ‘e ‘ad been
attempting to purloin strawberries.
    MAGISTRATE : He seems to have got the raspberry.
    (Laughter in
court.)
    Well, what
have you to say, young man?
    MERVYN : Oh, ah!
    MAGISTRATE : More ‘owe’ than ‘ah’, I fear.
    (Laughter in
court, in which his worship joined.)
    Ten pounds or
fourteen days.
     
    Well, you can
see how extremely unpleasant this must have been for my cousin’s son.
Considered purely from the dramatic angle, the magistrate had played him right
off the stage, hogging all the comedy and getting the sympathy of the audience
from the start; and, apart from that, here he was, nearing the end of the
quarter, with all his allowance spent except one pound, two and threepence,
suddenly called upon to pay ten pounds or go to durance Vile for a matter of
two weeks.
    There was only
one course before him. His sensitive soul revolted at the thought of
languishing in a dungeon for a solid fortnight, so it was imperative that he
raise the cash somewhere. And the only way of raising it that he could think of
was to apply to his uncle, Lord Blotsam.
    So he sent a
messenger round to Berkeley Square, explaining that he was in jail and hoping
his uncle was the same, and presently a letter was brought back by the butler,
containing ten pounds in postal orders, the Curse of the Blotsams, a third-class
ticket to Blotsarn Regis in Shropshire and instructions that, as soon as they
smote the fetters from his wrists, he was to take the first train there and go
and stay at Blotsam Castle till further notice.
    Because at the
castle, his uncle said in a powerful passage, even a blasted pimply pop-eyed
good-for-nothing scallywag and nincompoop like his nephew couldn’t get into
mischief and disgrace the family name.
    And in this,
Mervyn tells me, there was a good deal of rugged sense. Blotsam Castle, a noble
pile, is situated at least half a dozen miles from anywhere, and the only time
anybody ever succeeded in disgracing the family name, while in residence, was
back in the reign of Edward the Confessor, when the then Earl of Blotsam,
having lured a number of neighbouring landowners into the banqueting hall on
the specious pretence of standing them mulled sack, had proceeded to murder one
and all with a baffle-axe — subsequently cutting their heads off and — un
rather loud taste — sticking them on spikes along the outer battlements.
     
    So Mervyn went
down to Blotsam Regis and started to camp at the castle, and it was not long,
he tells me, before he began to find the time hanging a little