Chapter VII (2)

    “You aren’t going to tell me your fiancée has biffed you in the eye already?”
    “Have you heard?” said Ukridge, surprised. “Who told you I was engaged?”
    “George Tupper. I’ve just been seeing him.”
    “Oh, well, that saves a lot of explanation. Laddie,” said Ukridge, solemnly, “let this be a warning to you. Never——”
    I wanted facts, not moralisings.
    “How did you get the eye?” I interrupted.
    Ukridge blew out a cloud of smoke and his other eye glowed sombrely.
    “That was Ernie Finch,” he said, in a cold voice.
    “Who is Ernie Finch? I’ve never heard of him.”
    “He’s a sort of friend of the family, and as far as I can make out was going rather strong as regards Mabel till I came along. When we got engaged he was away, and no one apparently thought it worth while to tell him about it, and he came along one night and found me kissing her good-bye in the front garden. Observe how these things work out, Corky. The sight of him coming along suddenly gave Mabel a start, and she screamed; the fact that she screamed gave this man Finch a totally wrong angle on the situation; and this caused him, blast him, to rush up, yank off my glasses with one hand, and hit me with the other right in the eye. And before I could get at him the family were roused by Mabel’s screeches and came out and separated us and explained that I was engaged to Mabel. Of course, when he heard that, the man apologised. And I wish you could have seen the beastly smirk he gave when he was doing it. Then there was a bit of a row and old Price forbade him the house. A fat lot of good that was? I’ve had to stay indoors ever since waiting for the colour-scheme to dim a bit.”
    “Of course,” I urged, “one can’t help being sorry for the chap in a way.”
    “I can,” said Ukridge, emphatically. “I’ve reached the conclusion that there is not room in this world for Ernie Finch and myself, and I’m living in the hope of meeting him one of these nights down in a dark alley.”
    “You sneaked his girl,” I pointed out.
    “I don’t want his beastly girl,” said Ukridge, with ungallant heat.
    “Then you really do want to get out of this thing?”
    “Of course I want to get out of it.”
    “But, if you feel like that, how on earth did you ever let it happen?”
    “I simply couldn’t tell you, old horse,” said Ukridge, frankly. “It’s all a horrid blur. The whole affair was the most ghastly shock to me. It came absolutely out of a blue sky. I had never so much as suspected the possibility of such a thing. All I know is that we found ourselves alone in the drawing-room after Sunday supper, and all of a sudden the room became full of Prices of every description babbling blessings. And there I was!”
    “But you must have given them something to go on.”
    “I was holding her hand. I admit that.”
    “Ah!”
    “Well, my gosh, I don’t see why there should have been such a fuss about that. What does a bit of hand-holding amount to? The whole thing, Corky, my boy, boils down to the question, Is any man safe? It’s got so nowadays,” said Ukridge, with a strong sense of injury, “that you’ve only to throw a girl a kindly word, and the next thing you know you’re in the Lord Warden Hotel at Dover, picking the rice out of your hair.”
    “Well, you must own that you were asking for it. You rolled up in a new Daimler and put on enough dog for half a dozen millionaires. And you took the family for rides, didn’t you?”
    “Perhaps a couple of times.”
    “And talked about your aunt, I expect, and how rich she was?”
    “I may have touched on my aunt occasionally.”
    “Well, naturally these people thought you were sent from heaven. The wealthy son-in-law.” Ukridge projected himself from the depths sufficiently to muster up the beginnings of a faint smile of gratification at the description. Then his troubles swept him back again. “All you’ve got to do, if you want to get out of it, is to confess to them that you haven’t a bob.”
    “But, laddie, that’s the difficulty. It’s a most unfortunate thing, but, as it happens, I am on the eve of making an immense fortune, and I’m afraid I hinted as much to them from time to time.”
    “What do you mean?”
    “Since I saw you last I’ve put all my money in a bookmaker’s business.”
    “How do you mean—all your money? Where did you get any money?”
    “You haven’t forgotten the fifty quid I made selling tickets for my aunt’s dance? And then I collected a bit more here and there out of some judicious bets. So there it is. The firm is in a small way at present, but with the world full of mugs shoving and jostling one another to back losers, the thing is a potential goldmine, and I’m a sleeping partner. It’s no good my trying to make these people believe I’m hard up. They would simply laugh in my face and rush off and start breach-of-promise actions. Upon my Sam, it’s a little hard! Just when I have my foot firmly planted on the ladder of success, this has to happen.” He brooded in silence for awhile. “There’s just one scheme that occurred to me,” he said at length. “Would you have any objection to writing an anonymous letter?”
    “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—I would?”
    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 the rôle of 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 give Interesting Bits of 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.