“What’s the idea?”
“I was just thinking that, if you were to write them an anonymous letter, accusing me of all sorts of things——Might say I was married already.”
“Not a bit of good.”
“Perhaps you’re right,” said Ukridge, gloomily, and after a few minutes more of thoughtful silence I left him. I was standing on the front steps when I heard him clattering down the stairs.
“Corky, old man!”
“Hallo?”
“I think I’ve got it,” said Ukridge, joining me on the steps. “Came to me in a flash a second ago. How would it be if someone were to go down to Clapham and pretend to be a detective making enquiries about me? Dashed sinister and mysterious, you know. A good deal of meaning nods and shakes of the head. Give the impression that I was wanted for something or other. You get the idea? You would ask a lot of questions and take notes in a book——”
“How do you mean—Iwould?”
Ukridge looked at me in pained surprise.
“Surely, old horse, you wouldn’t object to doing a trifling service like this for an old friend?”
“I would, strongly. And in any case, what would be the use of my going? They’ve seen me.”
“Yes, but they wouldn’t recognise you. Yours,” said Ukridge, ingratiatingly, “is an ordinary, meaningless sort of face. Or one of those theatrical costumier people would fit you out with a disguise——”
“No!” I said, firmly. “I’m willing to do anything in reason to help you out of this mess, but I refuse to wear false whiskers for you or anyone.”
“All right then,” said Ukridge, despondently; “in that case, there’s nothing to be——”
At this moment he disappeared. It was so swiftly done that he seemed to have been snatched up to heaven. Only the searching odour of his powerful tobacco lingered to remind me that he had once been at my side, and only the slam of the front door told me where he had gone. I looked about, puzzled to account for this abrupt departure, and as I did so heard galloping footsteps and perceived a stout, bearded gentleman of middle age, clad in a frock-coat and a bowler hat. He was one of those men who, once seen, are not readily forgotten; and I recognised him at once. It was the creditor, the bloke Ukridge owed a bit of money to, the man who had tried to board our car in the Haymarket. Halting on the pavement below me, he removed the hat and dabbed at his forehead with a large coloured silk handkerchief.
“Was that Mr. Smallweed you were talking to?” he demanded, gustily. He was obviously touched in the wind.
“No,” I replied, civilly. “No. Not Mr. Smallweed.”
“You’re lying to me, young man!” cried the creditor, his voice rising in a too-familiar shout. And at the words, as if they had been some magic spell, the street seemed suddenly to wake from slumber. It seethed with human life. Maids popped out of windows, areas disgorged landladies, the very stones seemed to belch forth excited spectators. I found myself the centre of attraction—and, for some reason which was beyond me, cast for therôleof the villain of the drama. What I had actually done to the poor old man, nobody appeared to know; but the school of thought which held that I had picked his pocket and brutally assaulted him had the largest number of adherents, and there was a good deal of informal talk of lynching me. Fortunately a young man in a blue flannel suit, who had been one of the earliest arrivals on the scene, constituted himself a peacemaker.
“Come along, o’ man,” he said, soothingly, his arm weaving itself into that of the fermenting creditor. “You don’t want to make yourself conspicuous, do you?”
“In there!” roared the creditor, pointing at the door.
The crowd seemed to recognise that there had been an error in its diagnosis. The prevalent opinion now was that I had kidnapped the man’s daughter and was holding her prisoner behind that sinister door. The movement in favour of lynching me became almost universal.
“Now, now!” said the young man, whom I was beginning to like more every minute.
“I’ll kick the door in!”
“Now, now! You don’t want to go doing anything silly or foolish,” pleaded the peacemaker. “There’ll be a policeman along before you know where you are, and you’ll look foolish if he finds you kicking up a silly row.”
I must say that, if I had been in the bearded one’s place and had had right so indisputably on my side, this argument would not have influenced me greatly, but I suppose respectable citizens with a reputation to lose have different views on the importance of colliding with the police, however right they may be. The creditor’s violence began to ebb. He hesitated. He was plainly trying to approach the matter in the light of pure reason.
“You know where the fellow lives,” argued the young man. “See what I mean? Meantersay, you can come and find him whenever you like.”
This, too, sounded thin to me. But it appeared to convince the injured man. He allowed himself to be led away, and presently, the star having left the stage, the drama ceased to attract. The audience melted away. Windows closed, areas emptied themselves, and presently the street was given over once more to the cat lunching in the gutter and the coster hymning his Brussels sprouts.
A hoarse voice spoke through the letter-box.
“Has he gone, laddie?”
I put my mouth to the slit, and we talked together like Pyramus and Thisbe.
“Yes.”
“You’re sure?”
“Certain.”
“He isn’t lurking round the corner somewhere, waiting to pop out?”
“No. He’s gone.”
The door opened and an embittered Ukridge emerged.
“It’s a little hard!” he said, querulously. “You would scarcely credit it, Corky, but all that fuss was about a measly one pound two and threepence for a rotten little clockwork man that broke the first time I wound it up. Absolutely the first time, old man! It’s not as if it had been a tandem bicycle, an enlarging camera, a Kodak, and a magic lantern.”
I could not follow him.
“Why should a clockwork man be a tandem bicycle and the rest of it?”
“It’s like this,” said Ukridge. “There was a bicycle and photograph shop down near where I lived a couple of years ago, and I happened to see a tandem bicycle there which I rather liked the look of. So I ordered it provisionally from this cove. Absolutely provisionally, you understand. Also an enlarging camera, a Kodak, and a magic lantern. The goods were to be delivered when I had made up my mind about them. Well, after about a week the fellow asks if there are any further particulars I want to learn before definitely buying the muck. I say I am considering the matter, and in the meantime will he be good enough to let me have that little clockwork man in his window which walks when wound up?”
“Well?”
“Well, damme,” said Ukridge, aggrieved, “it didn’t walk. It broke the first time I tried to wind it. Then a few weeks went by and this bloke started to make himself dashed unpleasant. Wanted me to pay him money! I reasoned with the blighter. I said: ‘Now look here, my man, need we say any more about this? Really, I think you’ve come out of the thing extremely well. Which,’ I said, ‘would you rather be owed for? A clockwork man, or a tandem bicycle, an enlarging camera, a Kodak, and a magic lantern?’ You’d think that would have been simple enough for the meanest intellect, but no, he continued to make a fuss, until finally I had to move out of the neighbourhood. Fortunately, I had given him a false name——”
“Why?”
“Just an ordinary business precaution,” explained Ukridge.
“I see.”
“I looked on the matter as closed. But ever since then he has been bounding out at me when I least expect him. Once, by gad, he nearly nailed me in the middle of the Strand, and I had to leg it like a hare up Burleigh Street and through Covent Garden. I’d have been collared to a certainty, only he tripped over a basket of potatoes. It’s persecution, damme, that’s what it is—persecution!”
“Why don’t you pay the man?” I suggested.
“Corky, old horse,” said Ukridge, with evident disapproval of these reckless fiscal methods, “talk sense. How can I pay the man? Apart from the fact that at this stage of my career it would be madness to start flinging money right and left, there’s the principle of the thing!”
The immediate result of this disturbing episode was that Ukridge, packing his belongings in a small suit-case and reluctantly disgorging a week’s rent in lieu of notice, softly and silently vanished away from his own lodgings and came to dwell in mine, to the acute gratification of Bowles, who greeted his arrival with a solemn joy and brooded over him at dinner the first night like a father over a long-lost son. I had often given him sanctuary before in his hour of need, and he settled down with the easy smoothness of an old campaigner. He was good enough to describe my little place as a home from home, and said that he had half a mind to stay on and end his declining years there.
I cannot say that this suggestion gave me the rapturous pleasure it seemed to give Bowles, who nearly dropped the potato dish in his emotion; but still I must say that on the whole the man was not an exacting guest. His practice of never rising before lunch-time ensured me those mornings of undisturbed solitude which are so necessary to the young writer if he is to giveInteresting Bitsof his best; and if I had work to do in the evenings he was always ready to toddle downstairs and smoke a pipe with Bowles, whom he seemed to find as congenial a companion as Bowles found him. His only defect, indeed, was the habit he had developed of looking in on me in my bedroom at all hours of the night to discuss some new scheme designed to relieve him of his honourable obligations to Miss Mabel Price, of Balbriggan, Peabody Road, Clapham Common. My outspoken remarks on this behaviour checked him for forty-eight hours, but at three o’clock on the Sunday morning that ended the first week of his visit light flashing out above my head told me that he was in again.
“I think, laddie,” I heard a satisfied voice remark, as a heavy weight descended on my toes, “I think, laddie, that at last I have hit the bull’s-eye and rung the bell. Hats off to Bowles, without whom I would never have got the idea. It was only when he told me the plot of that story he is reading that I began to see daylight. Listen, old man,” said Ukridge, settling himself more comfortably on my feet, “and tell me if you don’t think I am on to a good thing. About a couple of days before Lord Claude Tremaine was to marry Angela Bracebridge, the most beautiful girl in London——”
“What the devil are you talking about? And do you know what the time is?”
“Never mind the time, Corky my boy. To-morrow is the day of rest and you can sleep on till an advanced hour. I was telling you the plot of this Primrose Novelette thing that Bowles is reading.”
“You haven’t woken me up at three in the morning to tell me the plot of a rotten novelette!”
“You haven’t been listening, old man,” said Ukridge, with gentle reproach. “I was saying that it was this plot that gave me my big idea. To cut it fairly short, as you seem in a strange mood, this Lord Claude bloke, having had a rummy pain in his left side, went to see a doctor a couple of days before the wedding, and the doc. gave him the start of his young life by telling him that he had only six months to live. There’s a lot more of it, of course, and in the end it turns out that the fool of a doctor was all wrong; but what I’m driving at is that this development absolutely put the bee on the wedding. Everybody sympathised with Claude and said it was out of the question that he could dream of getting married. So it suddenly occurred to me, laddie, that here was the scheme of a lifetime. I’m going to supper at Balbriggan to-morrow, and what I want you to do is simply to——”
“You can stop right there,” I said, with emotion. “I know what you want me to do. You want me to come along with you, disguised in a top-hat and a stethoscope, and explain to these people that I am a Harley Street specialist, and have been sounding you and have discovered that you are in the last stages of heart-disease.”
“Nothing of the kind, old man, nothing of the kind. I wouldn’t dream of asking you to do anything like that.”
“Yes, you would, if you had happened to think of it.”
“Well, as a matter of fact, since you mention it,” said Ukridge, thoughtfully, “it wouldn’t be a bad scheme. But if you don’t feel like taking it on——”
“I don’t.”
“Well, then, all I want you to do is to come to Balbriggan at about nine. Supper will be over by then. No sense,” said Ukridge, thoughtfully, “in missing supper. Come to Balbriggan at about nine, ask for me, and tell me in front of the gang that my aunt is dangerously ill.”
“What’s the sense in that?”
“You aren’t showing that clear, keen intelligence of which I have often spoken so highly, Corky. Don’t you see? The news is a terrible shock to me. It bowls me over. I clutch at my heart——”
“They’ll see through it in a second.”
“I ask for water——”
“Ah, that’s a convincing touch. That’ll make them realise you aren’t yourself.”
“And after awhile we leave. In fact, we leave as quickly as we jolly well can. You see what happens? I have established the fact that my heart is weak, and in a few days I write and say I’ve been looked over and the wedding must unfortunately be off because——”
“Damned silly idea!”
“Corky my boy,” said Ukridge gravely, “to a man as up against it as I am no idea is silly that looks as if it might work. Don’t you think this will work?”
“Well, it might, of course,” I admitted.
“Then I shall have a dash at it. I can rely on you to do your part?”
“How am I supposed to know that your aunt is ill?”
“Perfectly simple. They ’phoned from her house, and you are the only person who knows where I’m spending the evening.”
“And will you swear that this is really all you want me to do?”
“Absolutely all.”
“No getting me there and letting me in for something foul?”
“My dear old man!”
“All right,” I said. “I feel in my bones that something’s going to go wrong, but I suppose I’ve got to do it.”
“Spoken like a true friend,” said Ukridge.
At nine o’clock on the following evening I stood on the steps of Balbriggan waiting for my ring at the bell to be answered. Cats prowled furtively in the purple dusk, and from behind a lighted window on the ground floor of the house came the tinkle of a piano and the sound of voices raised in one of the more mournful types of hymn. I recognised Ukridge’s above the rest. He was expressing with a vigour which nearly cracked the glass a desire to be as a little child washed clean of sin, and it somehow seemed to deepen my already substantial gloom. Long experience of Ukridge’s ingenious schemes had given me a fatalistic feeling with regard to them. With whatever fair prospects I started out to co-operate with him on these occasions, I almost invariably found myself entangled sooner or later in some nightmare imbroglio.
The door opened. A maid appeared.
“Is Mr. Ukridge here?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Could I see him for a moment?”
I followed her into the drawing-room.
“Gentleman to see Mr. Ukridge, please,” said the maid, and left me to do my stuff.
I was aware of a peculiar feeling. It was a sort of dry-mouthed panic, and I suddenly recognised it as the same helpless stage-fright which I had experienced years before on the occasion when, the old place presumably being short of talent, I had been picked on to sing a solo at the annual concert at school. I gazed upon the roomful of Prices, and words failed me. Near the bookshelf against the wall was a stuffed seagull of blackguardly aspect, suspended with outstretched wings by a piece of string. It had a gaping gamboge beak and its eye was bright and sardonic. I found myself gazing at it in a hypnotised manner. It seemed to see through me at a glance.
It was Ukridge who came to the rescue. Incredibly at his ease in this frightful room, he advanced to welcome me, resplendent in a morning-coat, patent-leather shoes, and tie, all of which I recognised as my property. As always when he looted my wardrobe, he exuded wealth and respectability.
“Want to see me, laddie?”
His eye met mine meaningly, and I found speech. We had rehearsed this little scene with a good deal of care over the luncheon-table, and the dialogue began to come back to me. I was able to ignore the seagull and proceed.
“I’m afraid I have serious news, old man,” I said, in a hushed voice.
“Serious news?” said Ukridge, trying to turn pale.
“Serious news!”
I had warned him during rehearsals that this was going to sound uncommonly like a vaudeville cross-talk act of the Argumentative College Chums type, but he had ruled out the objection as far-fetched. Nevertheless, that is just what it did sound like, and I found myself blushing warmly.
“What is it?” demanded Ukridge, emotionally, clutching me by the arm in a grip like the bite of a horse.
“Ouch!” I cried. “Your aunt!”
“My aunt?”
“They telephoned from the house just now,” I proceeded, warming to my work, “to say that she had had a relapse. Her condition is very serious. They want you there at once. Even now it may be too late.”
“Water!” said Ukridge, staggering back and clawing at his waistcoat—or rather at my waistcoat, which I had foolishly omitted to lock up. “Water!”
It was well done. Even I, much as I wished that he would stop wrenching one of my best ties all out of shape, was obliged to admit that. I suppose it was his lifelong training in staggering under the blows of Fate that made him so convincing. The Price family seemed to be shaken to its foundations. There was no water in the room, but a horde of juvenile Prices immediately rushed off in quest of some, and meanwhile the rest of the family gathered about the stricken man, solicitous and sympathetic.
“My aunt! Ill!” moaned Ukridge.
“I shouldn’t worry, o’ man,” said a voice at the door.
So sneering and altogether unpleasant was this voice that for a moment I almost thought that it must have been the sea-gull that had spoken. Then, turning, I perceived a young man in a blue flannel suit. A young man whom I had seen before. It was the Peacemaker, the fellow who had soothed and led away the infuriated bloke to whom Ukridge owed a bit of money.
“I shouldn’t worry,” he said again, and looked malevolently upon Ukridge. His advent caused a sensation. Mr. Price, who had been kneading Ukridge’s shoulder with a strong man’s silent sympathy, towered as majestically as his five feet six would permit him.
“Mr. Finch,” he said, “may I enquire what you are doing in my house?”
“All right, all right——”
“I thought I told you——”
“All right, all right,” repeated Ernie Finch, who appeared to be a young man of character. “I’ve only come to expose an impostor.”
“Impostor!”
“Him!” said young Mr. Finch, pointing a scornful finger at Ukridge.
I think Ukridge was about to speak, but he seemed to change his mind. As for me, I had edged out of the centre of things, and was looking on as inconspicuously as I could from behind a red plush sofa. I wished to dissociate myself entirely from the proceedings.
“Ernie Finch,” said Mrs. Price, swelling, “what do you mean?”
The young man seemed in no way discouraged by the general atmosphere of hostility. He twirled his small moustache and smiled a frosty smile.
“I mean,” he said, feeling in his pocket and producing an envelope, “that this fellow here hasn’t got an aunt. Or, if he has, she isn’t Miss Julia Ukridge, the well-known and wealthy novelist. I had my suspicions about this gentleman right from the first, I may as well tell you, and ever since he came to this house I’ve been going round making a few enquiries about him. The first thing I did was to write his aunt—the lady he says is his aunt—making out I wanted her nephew’s address, me being an old school chum of his. Here’s what she writes back—you can see it for yourselves if you want to: ‘Miss Ukridge acknowledges receipt of Mr. Finch’s letter, and in reply wishes to state that she has no nephew.’ No nephew! That’s plain enough, isn’t it?” He raised a hand to check comment. “And here’s another thing,” he proceeded. “That motor-car he’s been swanking about in. It doesn’t belong to him at all. It belongs to a man named Fillimore. I noted the number and made investigations. This fellow’s name isn’t Ukridge at all. It’s Smallweed. He’s a penniless impostor who’s been pulling all your legs from the moment he came into the house; and if you let Mabel marry him you’ll be making the biggest bloomer of your lives!”
There was an awestruck silence. Price looked upon Price in dumb consternation.
“I don’t believe you,” said the master of the house at length, but he spoke without conviction.
“Then, perhaps,” retorted Ernie Finch, “you’ll believe this gentleman. Come in, Mr. Grindlay.”
Bearded, frock-coated, and sinister beyond words, the Creditor stalked into the room.
“You tell ’em,” said Ernie Finch.
The Creditor appeared more than willing. He fixed Ukridge with a glittering eye, and his bosom heaved with pent-up emotion.
“Sorry to intrude on a family on Sunday evening,” he said, “but this young man told me I should find Mr. Smallweed here, so I came along. I’ve been hunting for him high and low for two years and more about a matter of one pound two and threepence for goods supplied.”
“He owes you money?” faltered Mr. Price.
“He bilked me,” said the Creditor, precisely.
“Is this true?” said Mr. Price, turning to Ukridge.
Ukridge had risen and seemed to be wondering whether it was possible to sidle unobserved from the room. At this question he halted, and a weak smile played about his lips.
“Well——” said Ukridge.
The head of the family pursued his examination no further. His mind appeared to be made up. He had weighed the evidence and reached a decision. His eyes flashed. He raised a hand and pointed to the door.
“Leave my house!” he thundered.
“Right-o!” said Ukridge, mildly.
“And never enter it again!”
“Right-o!” said Ukridge.
Mr. Price turned to his daughter.
“Mabel,” he said, “this engagement of yours is broken. Broken, do you understand? I forbid you ever to see this scoundrel again. You hear me?”
“All right, pa,” said Miss Price, speaking for the first and last time. She seemed to be of a docile and equable disposition. I fancied I caught a not-displeased glance on its way to Ernie Finch.
“And now, sir,” cried Mr. Price, “go!”
“Right-o!” said Ukridge.
But here the Creditor struck a business note.
“And what,” he enquired, “about my one pound two and threepence?”
It seemed for a moment that matters were about to become difficult. But Ukridge, ever ready-witted, found the solution.
“Have you got one pound two and threepence on you, old man?” he said to me.
And with my usual bad luck I had.
We walked together down Peabody Road. Already Ukridge’s momentary discomfiture had passed.
“It just shows, laddie,” he said, exuberantly, “that one should never despair. However black the outlook, old horse, never, never despair. That scheme of mine might or might not have worked—one cannot tell. But, instead of having to go to all the bother of subterfuge, to which I always object, here we have a nice, clean-cut solution of the thing without any trouble at all.” He mused happily for a moment. “I never thought,” he said, “that the time would come when I would feel a gush of kindly feeling towards Ernie Finch; but, upon my Sam, laddie, if he were here now, I would embrace the fellow. Clasp him to my bosom, dash it!” He fell once more into a reverie. “Amazing, old horse,” he proceeded, “how things work out. Many a time I’ve been on the very point of paying that blighter Grindlay his money, merely to be rid of the annoyance of having him always popping up, but every time something seemed to stop me. I can’t tell you what it was—a sort of feeling. Almost as if one had a guardian angel at one’s elbow guiding one. My gosh, just think where I would have been if I had yielded to the impulse. It was Grindlay blowing in that turned the scale. By gad, Corky my boy, this is the happiest moment of my life.”
“It might be the happiest of mine,” I said, churlishly, “if I thought I should ever see that one pound two and threepence again.”
“Now, laddie, laddie,” protested Ukridge, “these are not the words of a friend. Don’t mar a moment of unalloyed gladness. Don’t you worry, you’ll get your money back. A thousandfold!”
“When?”
“One of these days,” said Ukridge, buoyantly. “One of these days.”
THE LONG ARM OF LOONEY COOTE
Given private means sufficiently large to pad them against the moulding buffets of Life, it is extraordinary how little men change in after years from the boys they once were. There was a youth in my house at school named Coote. J. G. Coote. And he was popularly known as Looney on account of the vain and foolish superstitions which seemed to rule his every action. Boys are hard-headed, practical persons, and they have small tolerance for the view-point of one who declines to join in a quiet smoke behind the gymnasium not through any moral scruples—which, to do him justice, he would have scorned—but purely on the ground that he had seen a magpie that morning. This was what J. G. Coote did, and it was the first occasion on which I remember him being addressed as Looney.
But, once given, the nickname stuck; and this in spite of the fact—seeing that we were caught half-way through the first cigarette and forcefully dealt with by a muscular head master—that that magpie of his would appear to have known a thing or two. For five happy years, till we parted to go to our respective universities, I never called Coote anything but Looney; and it was as Looney that I greeted him when we happened upon each other one afternoon at Sandown, shortly after the conclusion of the three o’clock race.
“Did you do anything on that one?” I asked, after we had exchanged salutations.
“I went down,” replied Looney, in the subdued but not heart-broken manner of the plutocrat who can afford to do these things. “I had a tenner on My Valet.”
“On My Valet!” I cried, aghast at this inexplicable patronage of an animal which, even in the preliminary saunter round the paddock, had shown symptoms of lethargy and fatigue, not to mention a disposition to trip over his feet. “Whatever made you do that?”
“Yes, I suppose he never had a chance,” agreed Coote, “but a week ago my man Spencer broke his leg, and I thought it might be an omen.”
And then I knew that, for all his moustache and added weight, he was still the old Looney of my boyhood.
“Is that the principle on which you always bet?” I enquired.
“Well, you’d be surprised how often it works. The day my aunt was shut up in the private asylum I collected five hundred quid by backing Crazy Jane for the Jubilee Cup. Have a cigarette?”
“Thanks.”
“Oh, my Lord!”
“Now what?”
“My pocket has been picked,” faltered Looney Coote, withdrawing a trembling hand. “I had a note-case with nearly a hundred quid, and it’s gone!”
The next moment I was astounded to observe a faint, resigned smile on the man’s face.
“Well, that makes two,” he murmured, as if to himself.
“Two what?”
“Two misfortunes. These things always go in threes, you know. Whenever anything rotten happens, I simply brace myself up for the other two things. Well, there’s only one more to come this time, thank goodness.”
“What was the first one?”
“I told you my man Spencer broke his leg.”
“I should have thought that would have ranked as one of Spencer’s three misfortunes. How do you come in?”
“Why, my dear fellow, I’ve been having the devil of a time since he dropped out. The ass they sent me from the agency as a substitute is no good at all. Look at that!” He extended a shapely leg. “Do you call that a crease?”
From the humble standpoint of my own bagginess, I should have called it an excellent crease, but he seemed thoroughly dissatisfied with it, so there was nothing to do but tell him to set his teeth and bear it like a man, and presently, the bell having rung for the three-thirty race, we parted.
“Oh, by the way,” said Looney, as he left me, “are you going to be at the old Wrykinian dinner next week?”
“Yes, I’m coming. So is Ukridge.”
“Ukridge? Good Lord, I haven’t seen old Ukridge for years.”
“Well, he will be there. And I expect he’ll touch you for a temporary loan. That will make your third misfortune.”
Ukridge’s decision to attend the annual dinner of the Old Boys of the school at which he and I had been—in a manner of speaking—educated had come as a surprise to me; for, though the meal was likely to be well-cooked and sustaining, the tickets cost half a sovereign apiece, and it was required of the celebrants that they wear evening-dress. And, while Ukridge sometimes possessed ten shillings which he had acquired by pawning a dress-suit, or a dress-suit which he had hired for ten shillings, it was unusual for him to have the two things together. Still, he was as good as his word, and on the night of the banquet turned up at my lodgings for a preliminary bracer faultlessly clad and ready for the feast.
Tactlessly, perhaps, I asked him what bank he had been robbing.
“I thought you told me a week ago that money was tight,” I said.
“It was tighter,” said Ukridge, “than these damned trousers. Never buy ready-made dress-clothes, Corky, my boy. They’re always unsatisfactory. But all that’s over now. I have turned the corner, old man. Last Saturday we cleaned up to an extraordinary extent at Sandown.”
“We?”
“The firm. I told you I had become a sleeping-partner in a bookie’s business.”
“For Heaven’s sake! You don’t mean to say that it is really making money?”
“Making money? My dear old lad, how could it help making money? I told you from the first the thing was a gold-mine. Affluence stares me in the eyeball. The day before yesterday I bought half-a-dozen shirts. That’ll show you!”
“How much have you made?”
“In some ways,” said Ukridge, sentimentally, “I regret this prosperity. I mean to say, those old careless impecunious days were not so bad. Not so bad, Corky, old boy, eh? Life had a tang then. It was swift, vivid, interesting. And there’s always the danger that one may allow oneself to grow slack and enervated with wealth. Still, it has its compensations. Yes, on the whole I am not sorry to have made my pile.”
“How much have you made?” I asked again, impressed by this time. The fact of Ukridge buying shirts for himself instead of purloining mine suggested an almost Monte Cristo-like opulence.
“Fifteen quid,” said Ukridge. “Fifteen golden sovereigns, my boy! And out of one week’s racing! And you must remember that the thing is going on all the year round. Month by month, week by week, we shall expand, we shall unfold, we shall develop. It wouldn’t be a bad scheme, old man, to drop a judicious word here and there among the lads at this dinner to-night, advising them to lodge their commissions with us. Isaac O’Brien is the name of the firm, 3 Blue Street, St. James’s. Telegraphic address, ‘Ikobee, London.’ and our representative attends all the recognised meetings. But don’t mention my connection with the firm. I don’t want it generally known, as it might impair my social standing. And now, laddie, if we don’t want to be late for this binge, we had better be starting.”
Ukridge, as I have recorded elsewhere, had left school under something of a cloud. Not to put too fine a point on it, he had been expelled for breaking out at night to attend the local fair, and it was only after many years of cold exclusion that he had been admitted to the pure-minded membership of the Old Boys’ Society.
Nevertheless, in the matter of patriotism he yielded to no one.
During our drive to the restaurant where the dinner was to be held he grew more and more sentimental about the dear old school, and by the time the meal was over and the speeches began he was in the mood when men shed tears and invite people, to avoid whom in calmer moments they would duck down side-streets, to go on long walking tours with them. He wandered from table to table with a large cigar in his mouth, now exchanging reminiscences, anon advising contemporaries who had won high positions in the Church to place their bets with Isaac O’Brien, of 3 Blue Street, St. James’s—a sound and trustworthy firm, telegraphic address “Ikobee, London.”
The speeches at these dinners always opened with a long and statistical harangue from the President, who, furtively consulting his paper of notes, announced the various distinctions gained by Old Boys during the past year. On this occasion, accordingly, he began by mentioning that A. B. Bodger (“Good old Bodger!”—from Ukridge) had been awarded the Mutt-Spivis Gold Medal for Geological Research at Oxford University—that C. D. Codger had been appointed to the sub-junior deanery of Westchester Cathedral—(“That’s the stuff, Codger, old horse!”)—that as a reward for his services in connection with the building of the new waterworks at Strelsau J. J. Swodger had received from the Government of Ruritania the Order of the Silver Trowel, third class (with crossed pickaxes).
“By the way,” said the President, concluding, “before I finish there is one more thing I would like to say. An old boy, B. V. Lawlor, is standing for Parliament next week at Redbridge. If any of you would care to go down and lend him a hand, I know he would be glad of your help.”
He resumed his seat, and the leather-lunged toastmaster behind him emitted a raucous “My Lord, Mr. President, and gentlemen, pray silence for Mr. H. K. Hodger, who will propose the health of ‘The Visitors.’” H. K. Hodger rose with the purposeful expression only to be seen on the face of one who has been reminded by the remarks of the last speaker of the story of the two Irishmen; and the company, cosily replete, settled down to give him an indulgent attention.
Not so Ukridge. He was staring emotionally across the table at his old friend Lawlor. The seating arrangements at these dinners were usually designed to bring contemporaries together at the same table, and the future member for Redbridge was one of our platoon.
“Boko, old horse,” demanded Ukridge, “is this true?”
A handsome but rather prominent nose had led his little playmates to bestow this affectionate sobriquet upon the coming M.P. It was one of those boyish handicaps which are never lived down, but I would not have thought of addressing B. V. Lawlor in this fashion myself, for, though he was a man of my own age, the years had made him extremely dignified. Ukridge, however, was above any such weakness. He gave out the offensive word in a vinous bellow of such a calibre as to cause H. K. Hodger to trip over a “begorra” and lose the drift of his story.
“’Sh!” said the President, bending a reproving gaze at our table.
“’Sh!” said B. V. Lawlor, contorting his smooth face.
“Yes, but is it?” persisted Ukridge.
“Of course it is,” whispered Lawlor. “Be quiet!”
“Then, damme,” shouted Ukridge, “rely on me, young Boko. I shall be at your side. I shall spare no efforts to pull you through. You can count on me to——”
“Really! Please! At that table down there,” said the President, rising, while H. K. Hodger, who had got as far as “Then, faith and begob, it’s me that’ll be afther——” paused in a pained manner and plucked at the table-cloth.
Ukridge subsided. But his offer of assistance was no passing whim, to be lightly forgotten in the slumbers of the night. I was still in bed a few mornings later when he burst in, equipped for travel to the last button and carrying a seedy suit-case.
“Just off, laddie, just off!”
“Fine!” I said. “Good-bye.”
“Corky, my boy,” boomed Ukridge, sitting creakingly on the bed and poisoning the air with his noisome tobacco, “I feel happy this morning. Stimulated. And why? Because I am doing an altruistic action. We busy men of affairs, Corky, are too apt to exclude altruism from our lives. We are too prone to say ‘What is there in it for me?’ and, if there proves on investigation to be nothing in it for us, to give it the miss-in-balk. That is why this business makes me so confoundedly happy. At considerable expense and inconvenience I am going down to Redbridge to-day, and what is there in it for me? Nothing. Nothing, my boy, except the pure delight of helping an old schoolfellow over a tough spot. If I can do anything, however little, to bring young Boko in at the right end of the poll, that will be enough reward for me. I am going to do my bit, Corky, and it may be that my bit will turn out to be just the trifle that brings home the bacon. I shall go down there and talk——”
“I bet you will.”
“I don’t know much about politics, it’s true, but I can bone up enough to get by. Invective ought to meet the case, and I’m pretty good at invective. I know the sort of thing. You accuse the rival candidate of every low act under the sun, without giving him quite enough to start a libel action on. Now, what I want you to do, Corky, old horse——”
“Oh heavens!” I moaned at these familiar words.
“——is just to polish up this election song of mine. I sat up half the night writing it, but I can see it limps in spots. You can put it right in half an hour. Polish it up, laddie, and forward without fail to the Bull Hotel, Redbridge, this afternoon. It may just be the means of shoving Boko past the post by a nose.”
He clattered out hurriedly; and, sleep being now impossible, I picked up the sheet of paper he had left and read the verses.
They were well meant, but that let them out. Ukridge was no poet or he would never have attempted to rhyme “Lawlor” with “before us.”
A rather neat phrase happening to occur to me at the breakfast table, coincident with the reflection that possibly Ukridge was right and it did behove his old schoolfellows to rally round the candidate, I spent the morning turning out a new ballad. Having finished this by noon, I despatched it to the Bull Hotel, and went off to lunch with something of that feeling of satisfaction which, as Ukridge had pointed out, does come to altruists. I was strolling down Piccadilly, enjoying an after-luncheon smoke, when I ran into Looney Coote.
On Looney’s amiable face there was a mingled expression of chagrin and satisfaction.
“It’s happened,” he said.
“What?”
“The third misfortune. I told you it would.”
“What’s the trouble now? Has Spencer broken his other leg?”
“My car has been stolen.”
A decent sympathy would no doubt have become me, but from earliest years I had always found it difficult to resist the temptation to be airy and jocose when dealing with Looney Coote. The man was so indecently rich that he had no right to have troubles.
“Oh, well,” I said, “you can easily get another. Fords cost practically nothing nowadays.”
“It wasn’t a Ford,” bleated Looney, outraged. “It was a brand-new Winchester-Murphy. I paid fifteen hundred pounds for it only a month ago, and now it’s gone.”
“Where did you see it last?”
“I didn’t see it last. My chauffeur brought it round to my rooms this morning, and, instead of staying with it as he should have done till I was ready, went off round the corner for a cup of coffee, so he says! And when he came back it had vanished.”
“The coffee?”
“The car, you ass. The car had disappeared. It had been stolen.”
“I suppose you have notified the police?”
“I’m on my way to Scotland Yard now. It just occurred to me. Have you any idea what the procedure is? It’s the first time I’ve been mixed up with this sort of thing.”
“You give them the number of the car, and they send out word to police-stations all over the country to look out for it.”
“I see,” said Looney Coote, brightening. “That sounds rather promising, what? I mean, it looks as if someone would be bound to spot it sooner or later.”
“Yes,” I said. “Of course, the first thing a thief would do would be to take off the number-plate and substitute a false one.”
“Oh, Great Scott! Not really?”
“And after that he would paint the car a different colour.”
“Oh, I say!”
“Still, the police generally manage to find them in the end. Years hence they will come on it in an old barn with the tonneau stoved in and the engines taken out. Then they will hand it back to you and claim the reward. But, as a matter of fact, what you ought to be praying is that you may never get it back. Then the thing would be a real misfortune. If you get it back as good as new in the next couple of days, it won’t be a misfortune at all, and you will have number three hanging over your head again, just as before. And who knows what that third misfortune may be? In a way, you’re tempting Providence by applying to Scotland Yard.”
“Yes,” said Looney Coote, doubtfully. “All the same, I think I will, don’t you know. I mean to say, after all, a fifteen-hundred-quid Winchester-Murphyisa fifteen-hundred-quid Winchester-Murphy, if you come right down to it, what?”
Showing that even in the most superstitious there may be grains of hard, practical common sense lurking somewhere.
It had not been my intention originally to take any part in the by-election in the Redbridge division beyond writing three verses of a hymn in praise of Boko Lawlor and sending him a congratulatory wire if he won. But two things combined to make me change my mind. The first was the fact that it occurred to me—always the keen young journalist—that there might be a couple of guineas ofInteresting Bitsmoney in it (“How a Modern Election is Fought: Humours of the Poll”); the second, that, ever since his departure Ukridge had been sending me a constant stream of telegrams so stimulating that eventually they lit the spark.
I append specimens:—
“Going strong. Made three speeches yesterday. Election song a sensation. Come on down.—Ukridge.”“Boko locally regarded as walk-over. Made four speeches yesterday. Election song a breeze. Come on down.—Ukridge.”“Victory in sight. Spoke practically all yesterday. Election song a riot. Children croon it in cots. Come on down.—Ukridge.”
“Going strong. Made three speeches yesterday. Election song a sensation. Come on down.—Ukridge.”
“Boko locally regarded as walk-over. Made four speeches yesterday. Election song a breeze. Come on down.—Ukridge.”
“Victory in sight. Spoke practically all yesterday. Election song a riot. Children croon it in cots. Come on down.—Ukridge.”
I leave it to any young author to say whether a man with one solitary political lyric to his credit could have resisted this. With the exception of a single music-hall song (“Mother, She’s Pinching My Leg,” tried out by Tim Sims, the Koy Komic, at the Peebles Hippodrome, and discarded, in response to a popular appeal, after one performance), no written words of mine had ever passed human lips. Naturally, it gave me a certain thrill to imagine the enlightened electorate of Redbridge—at any rate, the right-thinking portion of it—bellowing in its thousands those noble lines:—