How to justify the borrowing of an axe? Easy - just tell the butler that you need an axe in order to build a rabbit hutch.
Well, it is easy, that is, unless the butler is a fancier of rabbits and an expert on hutches.
We enter Wodehouse's novel, Money for Nothing, in Chapter 10, when our criminal mastermind has fallen into this very trap with a gullible and garrulous butler who has not only brought the axe but also settled in to tell endless, rambling tales of rabbits.
A dull despair settled upon Soapy. ... Words had begun to flutter out of this butler like bats out of a barn. He had become a sort of human Topical Talk on rabbits. He was speaking of rabbits he had known in his hot youth - their manners, customs and the amount of lettuce they had consumed per diem. To a man interested in rabbits but too lazy to look the subject up in the Encyclopaedia the narrative would have been enthralling. It induced in Soapy a feverishness that touched the skirts of homicidal mania. The thought came into his mind that there are other uses to which a hatchet may be put besides the making of rabbit-hutches. England trembled on the verge of being short one butler.-- P.G. Wodehouse
[The butler] had now become involved in a long story of his early manhood, and even had Soapy been less distrait he might have found it difficult to enjoy to the full. It was about an acquaintance of his who had kept rabbits, and it suffered in lucidity from his unfortunate habit of pronouncing rabbits "roberts", combined with the fact that by a singular coincidence the acquaintance had been a Mr Roberts. Roberts, it seemed, had been deeply attached to roberts. In fact, his practice of keeping roberts in the bedroom had led to trouble with Mrs Roberts, and in the end Mrs Roberts had drowned the roberts in the pond and Roberts, who thought the world of his roberts and not quite so highly of Mrs Roberts, had never forgiven her.
Here [the butler] paused, apparently for comment.
"Is that so?" said Soapy, breathing heavily.
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