The Code of the Woosters / Фамильная честь Вустеров

It was—”

“Bag-snatching,” he repeated firmly. “I remember it distinctly. Still, it’s all past, eh? We live a new life, don’t we? Splendid. Roderick[35 - Roderick – Родерик], come over here. This is most interesting.”

His friends, who had been examining a salver, put it down and joined us. He was about seven feet in height, and about six feet across, he caught the eye and arrested it. It was as if Nature had intended to make a gorilla, and had changed its mind at the last moment.

His gaze was keen and piercing.

I don’t know if you have even seen those pictures in the papers of Dictators with blazing eyes, inflaming the populace with fiery words, but that was what he reminded me of.

“Roderick,” said old Bassett, “I want you to meet this fellow. Here is a case which illustrates exactly what I have so often said—that prison life does not degrade, that it does not warp the character and prevent a man rising on stepping-stones of his dead self to higher things.”

I recognized the gag—one of Jeeves’s—and wondered where he could have heard it.

“Look at this chap. I gave him three months not long ago for snatching bags at railway stations, and it is quite evident that his term in jail has had the most excellent effect on him. He has reformed.”

“Oh, yes?” said the Dictator. I didn’t like the way he spoke. He was looking at me with a nasty sort of supercilious expression.

“What makes you think he has reformed?”

“Of course he has reformed.

Look at him. Well groomed, well dressed, a decent member of Society. What his present walk in life is, I do not know, but it is perfectly obvious that he is no longer stealing bags. What are you doing now, young man?”

“Stealing umbrellas, apparently,” said the Dictator. “I notice he’s got yours.”

I was going to deny the accusation hotly—I had, indeed, already opened my lips to do so—when I remembered that I had come out without my umbrella, and yet here I was, beyond any question of doubt, had one! What had caused me to take up the one that had been leaning against a seventeenth-century chair, I cannot say, unless it was the primeval instinct which makes a man without an umbrella reach out for the nearest one in sight, like a flower groping toward the sun.

“I say, I’m most frightfully sorry.”

Old Bassett said he was, too, sorry and disappointed. He said it was this sort of thing that made a man sick at heart.