"I don't suppose he belongs to every club in London," said General Sangore dully.
His figure, usually so ramrod erect, was bowed and sagging; his shoulders drooped. Suddenly he looked very old and tired and pasty. He seemed bewildered, like a man lost in a chamber of unimaginable horrors; he seemed to be groping through the rusty machinery of his mind for one wheel that would turn to a task for which it had never been designed.
2
"Once upon a time," said the Saint, "there was a walleyed wombat named Wilhelmina, who lived in a burrow in Tasmania and grieved resentfully over the fact that Nature had endowed her, like all females of the marsupial family, with an abdominal pouch or sac intended for the reception and protection of newborn marsupials. Since," however, the strabismic asymmetry of Wilhelmina's features had always deterred discriminating males of her species from making such advances to her as might have resulted in the production of young wombats, she was easily persuaded to regard this useful and ingenious organ as an indecent excrescence invented by the Creator in a lewd and absent-minded moment, and she soon became the leader of a strong movement among other unattractive wombats to suppress all references to it and to decry its use as sinful and reprehensible, and invariably wore a species of apron or sporran to conceal this obscene conformation of tissue from the world. Now it so happened that one night a purblind male wombat named Widgery, of dissolute habits…"
He was in the scullery of Bledford Manor with Lady Valerie Woodchester. They sat on the hard cold tile floor with their wrists and ankles bound with strong cord. A smear of blood had dried across Simon's face and in spite of his quiet satiric voice his head was aching savagely. Lady Valerie's face was very dirty and her hair was in wild disarray; she also had a headache, and she was in a poisonous temper.
"Oh, stop it!" she burst out jittery. "You've got me into a hell of a nice mess, haven't you? I suppose you enjoy this sort of thing, but I don't. Aren't you going to do something about it?"
"What would you like me to do?" he asked accommodatingly.
"What are they going to do with us?"
He shrugged.
"I'm not a thought reader. But you can use your imagination."