Ukridge’s Accident Syndicate - (2)

We gazed after him in silence as he tripped down the street. We noted the careful manner in which he paused at the corner to eye the traffic before crossing the road, the wary way in which he drew back to allow a truck to rattle past.
    “You heard that?” said Ukridge, tensely. “He climbed on to the top of the wardrobe!”
    “Yes.”
    “And you saw the way he dodged that excellent truck?”
    “Yes.”
    “Something’s got to be done,” said Ukridge, firmly. “The man has got to be awakened to a sense of his responsibilities.”
    Next day a deputation waited on Teddy Weeks.
    Ukridge was our spokesman, and he came to the point with admirable directness.
    “How about it?” asked Ukridge.
    “How about what?” replied Teddy Weeks, nervously, avoiding his accusing eye.
    “When do we get action?”
    “Oh, you mean that accident business?”
    “Yes.”
    “I’ve been thinking about that,” said Teddy Weeks.
    Ukridge drew the mackintosh which he wore indoors and out of doors and in all weathers more closely around him. There was in the action something suggestive of a member of the Roman Senate about to denounce an enemy of the State. In just such a manner must Cicero have swished his toga as he took a deep breath preparatory to assailing Clodius. He toyed for a moment with the ginger-beer wire which held his pince-nez in place, and endeavoured without success to button his collar at the back. In moments of emotion Ukridge’s collar always took on a sort of temperamental jumpiness which no stud could restrain.
    “And about time you were thinking about it,” he boomed, sternly.
    We shifted appreciatively in our seats, all except Victor Beamish, who had declined a chair and was standing by the mantelpiece. “Upon my Sam, it’s about time you were thinking about it. Do you realise that we’ve invested an enormous sum of money in you on the distinct understanding that we could rely on you to do your duty and get immediate results? Are we to be forced to the conclusion that you are so yellow and few in the pod as to want to evade your honourable obligations? We thought better of you, Weeks. Upon my Sam, we thought better of you. We took you for a two-fisted, enterprising, big-souled, one hundred-per-cent. he-man who would stand by his friends to the finish.”
    “Yes, but——”
    “Any bloke with a sense of loyalty and an appreciation of what it meant to the rest of us would have rushed out and found some means of fulfilling his duty long ago. You don’t even grasp at the opportunities that come your way. Only yesterday I saw you draw back when a single step into the road would have had a truck bumping into you.”
    “Well, it’s not so easy to let a truck bump into you.”
    “Nonsense. It only requires a little ordinary resolution. Use your imagination, man. Try to think that a child has fallen down in the street—a little golden-haired child,” said Ukridge, deeply affected. “And a dashed great cab or something comes rolling up. The kid’s mother is standing on the pavement, helpless, her hands clasped in agony. ‘Dammit,’ she cries, ‘will no one save my darling?’ ‘Yes, by George,’ you shout, ‘I will.’ And out you jump and the thing’s over in half a second. I don’t know what you’re making such a fuss about.”
    “Yes, but——” said Teddy Weeks.
    “I’m told, what’s more, it isn’t a bit painful. A sort of dull shock, that’s all.”
    “Who told you that?”
    “I forget. Someone.”
    “Well, you can tell him from me that he’s an ass,” said Teddy Weeks, with asperity.
    “All right. If you object to being run over by a truck there are lots of other ways. But, upon my Sam, it’s pretty hopeless suggesting them. You seem to have no enterprise at all. Yesterday, after I went to all the trouble to put a dog in your room, a dog which would have done all the work for you—all that you had to do was stand still and let him use his own judgment—what happened? You climbed on to——”
    Victor Beamish interrupted, speaking in a voice husky with emotion.
    “Was it you who put that damned dog in the room?”
    “Eh?” said Ukridge. “Why, yes. But we can have a good talk about all that later on,” he proceeded, hastily. “The point at the moment is how the dickens we’re going to persuade this poor worm to collect our insurance money for us. Why, damme, I should have thought you would have——”
    “All I can say——” began Victor Beamish, heatedly.
    “Yes, yes,” said Ukridge; “some other time. Must stick to business now, laddie. I was saying,” he resumed, “that I should have thought you would have been as keen as mustard to put the job through for your own sake. You’re always beefing that you haven’t any clothes to impress managers with. Think of all you can buy with your share of the swag once you have summoned up a little ordinary determination and seen the thing through. Think of the suits, the boots, the hats, the spats. You’re always talking about your dashed career, and how all you need to land you in a West-end production is good clothes. Well, here’s your chance to get them.”
    His eloquence was not wasted. A wistful look came into Teddy Weeks’s eye, such a look as must have come into the eye of Moses on the summit of Pisgah. He breathed heavily. You could see that the man was mentally walking along Cork Street, weighing the merits of one famous tailor against another.
    “I’ll tell you what I’ll do,” he said, suddenly. “It’s no use asking me to put this thing through in cold blood. I simply can’t do it. I haven’t the nerve. But if you fellows will give me a dinner to-night with lots of champagne I think it will key me up to it.”
    A heavy silence fell upon the room. Champagne! The word was like a knell.
    “How on earth are we going to afford champagne?” said Victor Beamish.
    “Well, there it is,” said Teddy Weeks. “Take it or leave it.”
    “Gentlemen,” said Ukridge, “it would seem that the company requires more capital. How about it, old horses? Let’s get together in a frank, business-like cards-on-the-table spirit, and see what can be done. I can raise ten bob.”
    “What!” cried the entire assembled company, amazed. “How?”
    “I’ll pawn a banjo.”
    “You haven’t got a banjo.”
    “No, but George Tupper has, and I know where he keeps it.”
    Started in this spirited way, the subscriptions came pouring in. I contributed a cigarette-case, Bertram Fox thought his landlady would let him owe for another week, Robert Dunhill had an uncle in Kensington who, he fancied, if tactfully approached, would be good for a quid, and Victor Beamish said that if the advertisement-manager of the O-So-Eesi Piano-Player was churlish enough to refuse an advance of five shillings against future work he misjudged him sadly. Within a few minutes, in short, the Lightning Drive had produced the impressive total of two pounds six shillings, and we asked Teddy Weeks if he thought that he could get adequately keyed up within the limits of that sum.
    “I’ll try,” said Teddy Weeks.
    So, not unmindful of the fact that that excellent hostelry supplied champagne at eight shillings the quart bottle, we fixed the meeting for seven o’clock at Barolini’s.
    Considered as a social affair, Teddy Weeks’s keying-up dinner was not a success. Almost from the start I think we all found it trying. It was not so much the fact that he was drinking deeply of Barolini’s eight-shilling champagne while we, from lack of funds, were compelled to confine ourselves to meaner beverages; what really marred the pleasantness of the function was the extraordinary effect the stuff had on Teddy. What was actually in the champagne supplied to Barolini and purveyed by him to the public, such as were reckless enough to drink it, at eight shillings the bottle remains a secret between its maker and his Maker; but three glasses of it were enough to convert Teddy Weeks from a mild and rather oily young man into a truculent swashbuckler.
    He quarrelled with us all. With the soup he was tilting at Victor Beamish’s theories of Art; the fish found him ridiculing Bertram Fox’s views on the future of the motion-picture; and by the time the leg of chicken with dandelion salad arrived—or, as some held, string salad—opinions varied on this point—the hell-brew had so wrought on him that he had begun to lecture Ukridge on his mis-spent life and was urging him in accents audible across the street to go out and get a job and thus acquire sufficient self-respect to enable him to look himself in the face in a mirror without wincing. Not, added Teddy Weeks with what we all thought uncalled-for offensiveness, that any amount of self-respect was likely to do that. Having said which, he called imperiously for another eight bobs’-worth.
    We gazed at one another wanly. However excellent the end towards which all this was tending, there was no denying that it was hard to bear. But policy kept us silent. We recognised that this was Teddy Weeks’s evening and that he must be humoured. Victor Beamish said meekly that Teddy had cleared up a lot of points which had been troubling him for a long time. Bertram Fox agreed that there was much in what Teddy had said about the future of the close-up. And even Ukridge, though his haughty soul was seared to its foundations by the latter’s personal remarks, promised to take his homily to heart and act upon it at the earliest possible moment.
    “You’d better!” said Teddy Weeks, belligerently, biting off the end of one of Barolini’s best cigars. “And there’s another thing—don’t let me hear of your coming and sneaking people’s socks again.”
    “Very well, laddie,” said Ukridge, humbly.
    “If there is one person in the world that I despise,” said Teddy, bending a red-eyed gaze on the offender, “it’s a snock-seeker—a seek-snocker—a—well, you know what I mean.”
    We hastened to assure him that we knew what he meant and he relapsed into a lengthy stupor, from which he emerged three-quarters of an hour later to announce that he didn’t know what we intended to do, but that he was going. We said that we were going too, and we paid the bill and did so.
    Teddy Weeks’s indignation on discovering us gathered about him upon the pavement outside the restaurant was intense, and he expressed it freely. Among other things, he said—which was not true—that he had a reputation to keep up in Soho.
    “It’s all right, Teddy, old horse,” said Ukridge, soothingly. “We just thought you would like to have all your old pals round you when you did it.”
    “Did it? Did what?”
    “Why, had the accident.”
    Teddy Weeks glared at him truculently. Then his mood seemed to change abruptly, and he burst into a loud and hearty laugh.
    “Well, of all the silly ideas!” he cried, amusedly. “I’m not going to have an accident. You don’t suppose I ever seriously intended to have an accident, do you? It was just my fun.” Then, with another sudden change of mood, he seemed to become a victim to an acute unhappiness. He stroked Ukridge’s arm affectionately, and a tear rolled down his cheek. “Just my fun,” he repeated. “You don’t mind my fun, do you?” he asked, pleadingly. “You like my fun, don’t you? All my fun. Never meant to have an accident at all. Just wanted dinner.” The gay humour of it all overcame his sorrow once more. “Funniest thing ever heard,” he said cordially. “Didn’t want accident, wanted dinner. Dinner daxident, danner dixident,” he added, driving home his point. “Well, good night all,” he said, cheerily. And, stepping off the kerb on to a banana-skin, was instantly knocked ten feet by a passing lorry.
    “Two ribs and an arm,” said the doctor five minutes later, superintending the removal proceedings. “Gently with that stretcher.”
    It was two weeks before we were informed by the authorities of Charing Cross Hospital that the patient was in a condition to receive visitors. A whip-round secured the price of a basket of fruit, and Ukridge and I were deputed by the shareholders to deliver it with their compliments and kind enquiries.
    “Hallo!” we said in a hushed, bedside manner when finally admitted to his presence.
    “Sit down, gentlemen,” replied the invalid.
    I must confess even in that first moment to having experienced a slight feeling of surprise. It was not like Teddy Weeks to call us gentlemen. Ukridge, however, seemed to notice nothing amiss.
    “Well, well, well,” he said, buoyantly. “And how are you, laddie? We’ve brought you a few fragments of fruit.”
    “I am getting along capitally,” replied Teddy Weeks, still in that odd precise way which had made his opening words strike me as curious. “And I should like to say that in my opinion England has reason to be proud of the alertness and enterprise of her great journals. The excellence of their reading-matter, the ingenuity of their various competitions, and, above all, the go-ahead spirit which has resulted in this accident insurance scheme are beyond praise. Have you got that down?” he enquired.
    Ukridge and I looked at each other. We had been told that Teddy was practically normal again, but this sounded like delirium.
    “Have we got that down, old horse?” asked Ukridge, gently.
    Teddy Weeks seemed surprised.
    “Aren’t you reporters?”
    “How do you mean, reporters?”
    “I thought you had come from one of these weekly papers that have been paying me insurance money, to interview me,” said Teddy Weeks.
    Ukridge and I exchanged another glance. An uneasy glance this time. I think that already a grim foreboding had begun to cast its shadow over us.
    “Surely you remember me, Teddy, old horse?” said Ukridge, anxiously.
    Teddy Weeks knit his brow, concentrating painfully.
    “Why, of course,” he said at last. “You’re Ukridge, aren’t you?”
    “That’s right. Ukridge.”
    “Of course. Ukridge.”
    “Yes. Ukridge. Funny your forgetting me!”
    “Yes,” said Teddy Weeks. “It’s the effect of the shock I got when that thing bowled me over. I must have been struck on the head, I suppose. It has had the effect of rendering my memory rather uncertain. The doctors here are very interested. They say it is a most unusual case. I can remember some things perfectly, but in some ways my memory is a complete blank.”
    “Oh, but I say, old horse,” quavered Ukridge. “I suppose you haven’t forgotten about that insurance, have you?”
    “Oh, no, I remember that.”
    Ukridge breathed a relieved sigh.
    “I was a subscriber to a number of weekly papers,” went on Teddy Weeks. “They are paying me insurance money now.”
    “Yes, yes, old horse,” cried Ukridge. “But what I mean is you remember the Syndicate, don’t you?”
    Teddy Weeks raised his eyebrows.
    “Syndicate? What Syndicate?”
    “Why, when we all got together and put up the money to pay for the subscriptions to these papers and drew lots, to choose which of us should go out and have an accident and collect the money. And you drew it, don’t you remember?”
    Utter astonishment, and a shocked astonishment at that, spread itself over Teddy Weeks’s countenance. The man seemed outraged.
    “I certainly remember nothing of the kind,” he said, severely. “I cannot imagine myself for a moment consenting to become a party to what from your own account would appear to have been a criminal conspiracy to obtain money under false pretences from a number of weekly papers.”
    “But, laddie——”
    “However,” said Teddy Weeks, “if there is any truth in this story, no doubt you have documentary evidence to support it.”
    Ukridge looked at me. I looked at Ukridge. There was a long silence.
    “Shift-ho, old horse?” said Ukridge, sadly. “No use staying on here.”
    “No,” I replied, with equal gloom. “May as well go.”
    “Glad to have seen you,” said Teddy Weeks, “and thanks for the fruit.”
    The next time I saw the man he was coming out of a manager’s office in the Haymarket. He had on a new Homburg hat of a delicate pearl grey, spats to match, and a new blue flannel suit, beautifully cut, with an invisible red twill. He was looking jubilant, and; as I passed him, he drew from his pocket a gold cigarette-case.
    It was shortly after that, if you remember, that he made a big hit as the juvenile lead in that piece at the Apollo and started on his sensational career as a matinee idol.
    Inside the church the organ had swelled into the familiar music of the Wedding March. A verger came out and opened the doors. The five cooks ceased their reminiscences of other and smarter weddings at which they had participated. The camera-men unshipped their cameras. The costermonger moved his barrow of vegetables a pace forward. A dishevelled and unshaven man at my side uttered a disapproving growl.
    “Idle rich!” said the dishevelled man.
    Out of the church came a beauteous being, leading attached to his arm another being, somewhat less beauteous.
    There was no denying the spectacular effect of Teddy Weeks. He was handsomer than ever. His sleek hair, gorgeously waved, shone in the sun, his eyes were large and bright; his lissome frame, garbed in faultless morning-coat and trousers, was that of an Apollo. But his bride gave the impression that Teddy had married money. They paused in the doorway, and the camera-men became active and fussy.
    “Have you got a shilling, laddie?” said Ukridge in a low, level voice.
    “Why do you want a shilling?”
    “Old horse,” said Ukridge, tensely, “it is of the utmost vital importance that I have a shilling here and now.”
    I passed it over. Ukridge turned to the dishevelled man, and I perceived that he held in his hand a large rich tomato of juicy and over-ripe appearance.
    “Would you like to earn a bob?” Ukridge said.
    “Would I!” replied the dishevelled man.
    Ukridge sank his voice to a hoarse whisper.
    The camera-men had finished their preparations. Teddy Weeks, his head thrown back in that gallant way which has endeared him to so many female hearts, was exhibiting his celebrated teeth. The cooks, in undertones, were making adverse comments on the appearance of the bride.
    “Now, please,” said one of the camera-men.
    Over the heads of the crowd, well and truly aimed, whizzed a large juicy tomato. It burst like a shell full between Teddy Weeks’s expressive eyes, obliterating them in scarlet ruin. It spattered Teddy Weeks’s collar, it dripped on Teddy Weeks’s morning-coat. And the dishevelled man turned abruptly and raced off down the street.
    Ukridge grasped my arm. There was a look of deep content in his eyes.
    “Shift-ho?” said Ukridge.
    Arm-in-arm, we strolled off in the pleasant June sunshine.
    CHAPTER III