Ukridge Sees her Through - (1)

The girl from the typewriting and stenographic bureau had a quiet but speaking eye. At first it had registered nothing but enthusiasm and the desire to please. But now, rising from that formidable notebook, it met mine with a look of exasperated bewilderment. There was an expression of strained sweetness on her face, as of a good woman unjustly put upon. I could read what was in her mind as clearly as if she had been impolite enough to shout it. She thought me a fool. And as this made the thing unanimous, for I had been feeling exactly the same myself for the last quarter of an hour, I decided that the painful exhibition must now terminate.
    It was Ukridge who had let me in for the thing. He had fired my imagination with tales of authors who were able to turn out five thousand words a day by dictating their stuff to a stenographer instead of writing it; and though I felt at the time that he was merely trying to drum up trade for the typewriting bureau in which his young friend Dora Mason was now a partner, the lure of the idea had gripped me. Like all writers, I had a sturdy distaste for solid work, and this seemed to offer a pleasant way out, turning literary composition into a jolly tête-à-tête chat. It was only when those gleaming eyes looked eagerly into mine and that twitching pencil poised itself to record the lightest of my golden thoughts that I discovered what I was up against. For fifteen minutes I had been experiencing all the complex emotions of a nervous man who, suddenly called upon to make a public speech, realises too late that his brain has been withdrawn and replaced by a cheap cauliflower substitute: and I was through.
    “I’m sorry,” I said, “but I’m afraid it’s not much use going on. I don’t seem able to manage it.”
    Now that I had come frankly out into the open and admitted my idiocy, the girl’s expression softened. She closed her notebook forgivingly.
    “Lots of people can’t,” she said. “It’s just a knack.”
    “Everything seems to go out of my head.”
    “I’ve often thought it must be very difficult to dictate.”
    Two minds with but a single thought, in fact. Her sweet reasonableness, combined with the relief that the thing was over, induced in me a desire to babble. One has the same feeling when the dentist lets one out of his chair.
    “You’re from the Norfolk Street Agency, aren’t you?” I said. A silly question, seeing that I had expressly rung them up on the telephone and asked them to send somebody round; but I was still feeling the effects of the ether.
    “Yes.”
    “That’s in Norfolk Street, isn’t it? I mean,” I went on hurriedly, “I wonder if you know a Miss Mason there? Miss Dora Mason.”
    She seemed surprised.
    “My name is Dora Mason,” she said.
    I was surprised, too. I had not supposed that partners in typewriting businesses stooped to going out on these errands. And I was conscious of a return of my former embarrassment, feeling—quite unreasonably, for I had only seen her once in my life, and then from a distance—that I ought to have remembered her.
    “We were short-handed at the office,” she explained, “so I came along. But how do you know my name?”
    “I am a great friend of Ukridge’s.”
    “Why, of course! I was wondering why your name was so familiar. I’ve heard him talk so much about you.”
    And after that we really did settle down to the cosy tête-à-tête of which I had had visions. She was a nice girl, the only noticeable flaw in her character being an absurd respect for Ukridge’s intelligence and abilities. I, who had known that foe of the human race from boyhood up and was still writhing beneath the memory of the night when he had sneaked my dress clothes, could have corrected her estimate of him, but it seemed unkind to shatter her girlish dreams.
    “He was wonderful about this type-writing business,” she said. “It was such a splendid opportunity, and but for Mr. Ukridge I should have had to let it slip. You see, they were asking two hundred pounds for the partnership, and I only had a hundred. And Mr. Ukridge insisted on putting up the rest of the money. You see—I don’t know if he told you—he insisted that he ought to do something because he says he lost me the position I had with his aunt. It wasn’t his fault at all, really, but he kept saying that if I hadn’t gone to that dance with him I shouldn’t have got back late and been dismissed. So——”
    She was a rapid talker, and it was only now that I was able to comment on the amazing statement which she had made in the opening portion of her speech. So stunning had been the effect of those few words on me that I had hardly heard her subsequent remarks.
    “Did you say that Ukridge insisted on finding the rest?” I gasped.
    “Yes. Wasn’t it nice of him?”
    “He gave you a hundred pounds? Ukridge!”
    “Guaranteed it,” said Miss Mason. “I arranged to pay a hundred pounds down and the rest in sixty days.”
    “But suppose the rest is not paid in sixty days?”
    “Well, then I’m afraid I should lose my hundred. But it will be, of course. Mr. Ukridge told me to have no anxiety about that at all. Well, good-bye, Mr. Corcoran. I must be going now. I’m sorry we didn’t get better results with the dictating. I should think it must be very difficult to do till you get used to it.”
    Her cheerful smile as she went out struck me as one of the most pathetic sights I had ever seen. Poor child, bustling off so brightly when her whole future rested on Ukridge’s ability to raise a hundred pounds! I presumed that he was relying on one of those Utopian schemes of his which were to bring him in thousands—“at a conservative estimate, laddie!”—and not for the first time in a friendship of years the reflection came to me that Ukridge ought to be in some sort of a home. A capital fellow in many respects, but not a man lightly to be allowed at large.
    I was pursuing this train of thought when the banging of the front door, followed by a pounding of footsteps on the stairs and a confused noise without, announced his arrival.
    “I say, laddie,” said Ukridge, entering the room, as was his habit, like a north-easterly gale, “was that Dora Mason I saw going down the street? It looked like her back. Has she been here?”
    “Yes. I asked her agency to send someone to take dictation, and she came.”
    Ukridge reached out for the tobacco jar, filled his pipe, replenished his pouch, sank comfortably on to the sofa, adjusted the cushions, and bestowed an approving glance upon me.
    “Corky, my boy,” said Ukridge, “what I like about you and the reason why I always maintain that you will be a great man one of these days is that you have Vision. You have the big, broad, flexible outlook. You’re not too proud to take advice. I say to you, ‘Dictate your stuff, it’ll pay you,’ and, damme, you go straight off and do it. No arguing or shilly-shallying. You just go and do it. It’s the spirit that wins to success. I like to see it. Dictating will add thousands a year to your income. I say it advisedly, laddie—thousands. And if you continue leading a steady and sober life and save your pennies, you’ll be amazed at the way your capital will pile up. Money at five per cent. compound interest doubles itself every fourteen years. By the time you’re forty——”
    It seemed churlish to strike a jarring note after all these compliments, but it had to be done.
    “Never mind about what’s going to happen to me when I’m forty,” I said. “What I want to know is what is all this I hear about you guaranteeing Miss Mason a hundred quid?”
    “Ah, she told you? Yes,” said Ukridge, airily, “I guaranteed it. Matter of conscience, old son. Man of honour, no alternative. You see, there’s no getting away from it, it was my fault that she was sacked by my aunt. Got to see her through, laddie, got to see her through.”
    I goggled at the man.
    “Look here,” I said, “let’s get this thing straight. A couple of days ago you touched me for five shillings and said it would save your life.”
    “It did, old man, it did.”
    “And now you’re talking of scattering hundred quids about the place as if you were Rothschild. Do you smoke it or inject it with a hypodermic needle?”
    There was pain in Ukridge’s eyes as he sat up and gazed at me through the smoke.
    “I don’t like this tone, laddie,” he said, reproachfully. “Upon my Sam, it wounds me. It sounds as if you had lost faith in me, in my vision.”
    “Oh, I know you’ve got vision. And the big, broad, flexible outlook. Also snap, ginger, enterprise, and ears that stick out at right angles like the sails of a windmill. But that doesn’t help me to understand where on earth you expect to get a hundred quid.”
    Ukridge smiled tolerantly.
    “You don’t suppose I would have guaranteed the money for poor little Dora unless I knew where to lay my hands on it, do you? If you ask me, Have I got the stuff at this precise moment? I candidly reply, No, I haven’t. But it’s fluttering on the horizon, laddie, fluttering on the horizon. I can hear the beating of its wings.”
    “Is Battling Billson going to fight someone and make your fortune again?”
    Ukridge winced, and the look of pain flitted across his face once more.
    “Don’t mention that man’s name to me, old horse,” he begged. “Every time I think of him everything seems to go all black. No, the thing I have on hand now is a real solid business proposition. Gilt-edged, you might call it. I ran into a bloke the other day whom I used to know out in Canada.”
    “I didn’t know you had ever been in Canada,” I interrupted.
    “Of course I’ve been in Canada. Go over there and ask the first fellow you meet if I was ever in Canada. Canada! I should say I had been in Canada. Why, when I left Canada, I was seen off on the steamer by a couple of policemen. Well, I ran into this bloke in Piccadilly. He was wandering up and down and looking rather lost. Couldn’t make out what the deuce he was doing over here, because, when I knew him, he hadn’t a cent. Well, it seems that he got fed up with Canada and went over to America to try and make his fortune. And, by Jove, he did, first crack out of the box. Bought a bit of land about the size of a pocket-handkerchief in Texas or Oklahoma or somewhere, and one morning, when he was hoeing the soil or planting turnips or something, out buzzed a whacking great oil-well. Apparently that sort of thing’s happening every day out there. If I could get a bit of capital together, I’m dashed if I wouldn’t go to Texas myself. Great open spaces where men are men, laddie—suit me down to the ground. Well, we got talking, and he said that he intended to settle in England. Came from London as a kid, but couldn’t stick it at any price now because they had altered it so much. I told him the thing for him to do was to buy a house in the country with a decent bit of shooting, and he said, ‘Well, how do you buy a house in the country with a decent bit of shooting?’ and I said, ‘Leave it entirely in my hands, old horse. I’ll see you’re treated right.’ So he told me to go ahead, and I went to Farmingdons, the house-agent blokes in Cavendish Square. Had a chat with the manager. Very decent old bird with moth-eaten whiskers. I said I’d got a millionaire looking for a house in the country. ‘Find him one, laddie,’ I said, ‘and we split the commish.’ He said ‘Right-o,’ and any day now I expect to hear that he’s dug up something suitable. Well, you can see for yourself what that’s going to mean. These house-agent fellows take it as a personal affront if a client gets away from them with anything except a collar-stud and the clothes he stands up in, and I’m in halves. Reason it out, my boy, reason it out.”
    “You’re sure this man really has money?”
    “Crawling with it, laddie. Hasn’t found out yet there’s anything smaller than a five-pound note in circulation. He took me to lunch, and when he tipped the waiter the man burst into tears and kissed him on both cheeks.”
    I am bound to admit that I felt easier in my mind, for it really did seem as though the fortunes of Miss Mason rested on firm ground. I had never supposed that Ukridge could be associated with so sound a scheme, and I said so. In fact, I rather overdid my approval, for it encouraged him to borrow another five shillings; and before he left we were in treaty over a further deal which was to entail my advancing him half a sovereign in one solid payment. Business breeds business.
    For the next ten days I saw nothing of Ukridge. As he was in the habit of making these periodical disappearances, I did not worry unduly as to the whereabouts of my wandering boy, but I was conscious from time to time of a mild wonder as to what had become of him. The mystery was solved one night when I was walking through Pall Mall on my way home after a late session with an actor acquaintance who was going into vaudeville, and to whom I hoped,—mistakenly, as it turned out—to sell a one-act play.
    I say night, but it was nearly two in the morning. The streets were black and deserted, silence was everywhere, and all London slept except Ukridge and a friend of his whom I came upon standing outside Hardy’s fishing tackle shop. That is to say, Ukridge was standing outside the shop. His friend was sitting on the pavement with his back against a lamp-post.
    As far as I could see in the uncertain light, he was a man of middle age, rugged of aspect and grizzled about the temples. I was able to inspect his temples because—doubtless from the best motives—he was wearing his hat on his left foot. He was correctly clad in dress clothes, but his appearance was a little marred by a splash of mud across his shirt-front and the fact that at some point earlier in the evening he had either thrown away or been deprived of his tie. He gazed fixedly at the hat with a poached-egg-like stare. He was the only man I had ever seen who was smoking two cigars at the same time.
    Ukridge greeted me with the warmth of a beleaguered garrison welcoming the relieving army.
    “My dear old horse! Just the man I wanted!” he cried, as if he had picked me out of a number of competing applicants. “You can give me a hand with Hank, laddie.”
    “Is this Hank!” I enquired, glancing at the recumbent sportsman, who had now closed his eyes as if the spectacle of the hat had begun to pall.
    “Yes. Hank Philbrick. This is the bloke I was telling you about, the fellow who wants the house.”
    “He doesn’t seem to want any house. He looks quite satisfied with the great open spaces.”
    “Poor old Hank’s a bit under the weather,” explained Ukridge, regarding his stricken friend with tolerant sympathy. “It takes him this way. The fact is, old man, it’s a mistake for these blokes to come into money. They overdo things. The only thing Hank ever got to drink for the first fifty years of his life was water, with buttermilk as a treat on his birthday, and he’s trying to make up for lost time. He’s only just discovered that there are such things as liqueurs in the world, and he’s making them rather a hobby. Says they’re such a pretty colour. It wouldn’t be so bad if he stuck to one at a time, but he likes making experiments. Mixes them, laddie. Orders the whole lot and blends them in a tankard. Well, I mean to say,” said Ukridge reasonably, “you can’t take more than five or six tankards of mixed benedictine, chartreuse, kummel, crème de menthe, and old brandy without feeling the strain a bit. Especially if you stoke up on champagne and burgundy.”
    A strong shudder ran through me at the thought. I gazed at the human cellar on the pavement with a feeling bordering on awe.
    “Does he really?”
    “Every night for the last two weeks. I’ve been with him most of the time. I’m the only pal he’s got in London, and he likes to have me round.”
    “What plans have you for his future? His immediate future, I mean. Do we remove him somewhere or is he going to spend the night out here under the quiet stars?”
    “I thought, if you would lend a hand, old man, we could get him to the Carlton. He’s staying there.”
    “He won’t be long, if he comes in in this state.”
    “Bless you, my dear old man, they don’t mind. He tipped the night-porter twenty quid yesterday and asked me if I thought it was enough. Lend a hand, laddie. Let’s go.”
    I lent a hand, and we went.
    The effect which that nocturnal encounter had upon me was to cement the impression that in acting as agent for Mr. Philbrick in the purchase of a house Ukridge was on to a good thing. What little I had seen of Hank had convinced me that he was not the man to be finicky about price. He would pay whatever they asked him without hesitation. Ukridge would undoubtedly make enough out of his share of the commission to pay off Dora Mason’s hundred without feeling it. Indeed, for the first time in his life he would probably be in possession of that bit of capital of which he was accustomed to speak so wistfully. I ceased, therefore, to worry about Miss Mason’s future and concentrated myself on my own troubles.
    They would probably have seemed to anyone else minor troubles, but nevertheless they were big enough to depress me. Two days after my meeting with Ukridge and Mr. Philbrick in Pall Mall I had received rather a disturbing letter.
    There was a Society paper for which at that time I did occasional work and wished to do more; and the editor of this paper had sent me a ticket for the forthcoming dance of the Pen and Ink Club, with instructions to let him have a column and a half of bright descriptive matter. It was only after I had digested the pleasant reflection that here was a bit of badly needed cash dropping on me out of a clear sky that I realised why the words Pen and Ink Club seemed to have a familiar ring. It was the club of which Ukridge’s aunt Julia was the popular and energetic president, and the thought of a second meeting with that uncomfortable woman filled me with a deep gloom. I had not forgotten—and probably would never forget—my encounter with her in her drawing-room at Wimbledon.
    I was not in a financial position, however, to refuse editors their whims, so the thing had to be gone through; but the prospect damped me, and I was still brooding on it when a violent ring at the front-door bell broke in on my meditations. It was followed by the booming of Ukridge’s voice enquiring if I were in. A moment later he had burst into the room. His eyes were wild, his pince-nez at an angle of forty-five, and his collar separated from its stud by a gap of several inches. His whole appearance clearly indicated some blow of fate, and I was not surprised when his first words revealed an aching heart.
    “Hank Philbrick,” said Ukridge without preamble, “is a son of Belial, a leper, and a worm.”
    “What’s happened now?”
    “He’s let me down, the weak-minded Tishbite! Doesn’t want that house in the country after all. My gosh, if Hank Philbrick is the sort of man Canada is producing nowadays, Heaven help the British Empire.”
    I shelved my petty troubles. They seemed insignificant beside this majestic tragedy.
    “What made him change his mind?” I asked.
    “The wobbling, vacillating hell-hound! I always had a feeling that there was something wrong with that man. He had a nasty, shifty eye. You’ll bear me out, laddie, in that? Haven’t I spoken to you a hundred times about his shifty eye?”
    “Certainly. Why did he change his mind?”
    “Didn’t I always say he wasn’t to be trusted?”
    “Repeatedly. What made him change his mind?”
    Ukridge laughed with a sharp bitterness that nearly cracked the window-pane. His collar leaped like a live thing. Ukridge’s collar was always a sort of thermometer that registered the warmth of his feelings. Sometimes, when his temperature was normal, it would remain attached to its stud for minutes at a time; but the slightest touch of fever sent it jumping up, and the more he was moved the higher it jumped.
    “When I knew Hank out in Canada,” he said, “he had the constitution of an ox. Ostriches took his correspondence course in digestion. But directly he comes into a bit of money——Laddie,” said Ukridge earnestly, “when I’m a rich man, I want you to stand at my elbow and watch me very carefully. The moment you see signs of degeneration speak a warning word. Don’t let me coddle myself. Don’t let me get fussy about my health. Where was I? Oh yes. Directly this man comes into a bit of money he gets the idea that he’s a sort of fragile, delicate flower.”