No Wedding Bells for him - (2)

“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.
    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.”
    CHAPTER VIII