Ukridge Rounds a Nasty Corner - (1)

The late Sir Rupert Lakenheath, K.C.M.G., C.B., M.V.O., was one of those men at whom their countries point with pride. Until his retirement on a pension in the year 1906, he had been Governor of various insanitary outposts of the British Empire situated around the equator, and as such had won respect and esteem from all. A kindly editor of my acquaintance secured for me the job of assisting the widow of this great administrator to prepare his memoirs for publication; and on a certain summer afternoon I had just finished arraying myself suitably for my first call on her at her residence in Thurloe Square, South Kensington, when there was a knock at the door, and Bowles, my landlord, entered, bearing gifts.
    These consisted of a bottle with a staring label and a large cardboard hat-box. I gazed at them blankly, for they held no message for me.
    Bowles, in his ambassadorial manner, condescended to explain.
    “Mr. Ukridge,” he said, with the ring of paternal affection in his voice which always crept into it when speaking of that menace to civilisation, “called a moment ago, sir, and desired me to hand you these.”
    Having now approached the table on which he had placed the objects, I was enabled to solve the mystery of the bottle. It was one of those, fat, bulging bottles, and it bore across its diaphragm in red letters the single word “PEPPO.” Beneath this, in black letters, ran the legend, “It Bucks You Up.” I had not seen Ukridge for more than two weeks, but at our last meeting, I remembered, he had spoken of some foul patent medicine of which he had somehow secured the agency. This, apparently, was it.
    “But what’s in the hat-box?” I asked.
    “I could not say, sir,” replied Bowles.
    At this point the hat-box, which had hitherto not spoken, uttered a crisp, sailorly oath, and followed it up by singing the opening bars of “Annie Laurie.” It then relapsed into its former moody silence.
    A few doses of Peppo would, no doubt, have enabled me to endure this remarkable happening with fortitude and phlegm. Not having taken that specific, the thing had a devastating effect upon my nervous centres. I bounded back and upset a chair, while Bowles, his dignity laid aside, leaped silently towards the ceiling. It was the first time I had ever seen him lay off the mask, and even in that trying moment I could not help being gratified by the spectacle. It gave me one of those thrills that come once in a lifetime.
    “For Gord’s sake!” ejaculated Bowles.
    “Have a nut,” observed the hat-box, hospitably. “Have a nut.”
    Bowles’s panic subsided.
    “It’s a bird, sir. A parrot!”
    “What the deuce does Ukridge mean,” I cried, becoming the outraged householder, “by cluttering up my rooms with his beastly parrots? I’d like that man to know——”
    The mention of Ukridge’s name seemed to act on Bowles like a soothing draught. He recovered his poise.
    “I have no doubt, sir,” he said, a touch of coldness in his voice that rebuked my outburst, “that Mr. Ukridge has good reasons for depositing the bird in our custody. I fancy he must wish you to take charge of it for him.”
    “He may wish it——” I was beginning, when my eye fell on the clock. If I did not want to alienate my employer by keeping her waiting, I must be on my way immediately.
    “Put that hat-box in the other room, Bowles,” I said. “And I suppose you had better give the bird something to eat.”
    “Very good, sir. You may leave the matter in my hands with complete confidence.”
    The drawing-room into which I was shown on arriving at Thurloe Square was filled with many mementoes of the late Sir Rupert’s gubernatorial career. In addition the room contained a small and bewilderingly pretty girl in a blue dress, who smiled upon me pleasantly.
    “My aunt will be down in a moment,” she said, and for a few moments we exchanged commonplaces. Then the door opened and Lady Lakenheath appeared.
    The widow of the Administrator was tall, angular, and thin, with a sun-tanned face of a cast so determined as to make it seem a tenable theory that in the years previous to 1906 she had done at least her share of the administrating. Her whole appearance was that of a woman designed by Nature to instil law and order into the bosoms of boisterous cannibal kings. She surveyed me with an appraising glance, and then, as if reconciled to the fact that, poor specimen though I might be, I was probably as good as anything else that could be got for the money, received me into the fold by pressing the bell and ordering tea.
    Tea had arrived, and I was trying to combine bright dialogue with the difficult feat of balancing my cup on the smallest saucer I had ever seen, when my hostess, happening to glance out of window into the street below, uttered something midway between a sigh and a click of the tongue.
    “Oh, dear! That extraordinary man again!”
    The girl in the blue dress, who had declined tea and was sewing in a distant corner, bent a little closer over her work.
    “Millie!” said the administratress, plaintively, as if desiring sympathy in her trouble.
    “Yes, Aunt Elizabeth?”
    “That man is calling again!”
    There was a short but perceptible pause. A delicate pink appeared in the girl’s cheeks.
    “Yes, Aunt Elizabeth?” she said.
    “Mr. Ukridge,” announced the maid at the door.
    It seemed to me that if this sort of thing was to continue, if existence was to become a mere series of shocks and surprises, Peppo would have to be installed as an essential factor in my life. I stared speechlessly at Ukridge as he breezed in with the unmistakable air of sunny confidence which a man shows on familiar ground. Even if I had not had Lady Lakenheath’s words as evidence, his manner would have been enough to tell me that he was a frequent visitor in her drawing-room; and how he had come to be on calling terms with a lady so pre-eminently respectable it was beyond me to imagine. I awoke from my stupor to find that we were being introduced, and that Ukridge, for some reason clear, no doubt, to his own tortuous mind but inexplicable to me, was treating me as a complete stranger. He nodded courteously but distantly, and I, falling in with his unspoken wishes, nodded back. Plainly relieved, he turned to Lady Lakenheath and plunged forthwith into the talk of intimacy.
    “I’ve got good news for you,” he said. “News about Leonard.”
    The alteration in our hostess’s manner at these words was remarkable. Her somewhat forbidding manner softened in an instant to quite a tremulous fluttering. Gone was the hauteur which had caused her but a moment back to allude to him as “that extraordinary man.” She pressed tea upon him, and scones.
    “Oh, Mr. Ukridge!” she cried.
    “I don’t want to rouse false hopes and all that sort of thing, laddie—I mean, Lady Lakenheath, but, upon my Sam, I really believe I am on the track. I have been making the most assiduous enquiries.”
    “How very kind of you!”
    “No, no,” said Ukridge, modestly.
    “I have been so worried,” said Lady Lakenheath, “that I have scarcely been able to rest.”
    “Too bad!”
    “Last night I had a return of my wretched malaria.”
    At these words, as if he had been given a cue, Ukridge reached under his chair and produced from his hat, like some conjurer, a bottle that was own brother to the one he had left in my rooms. Even from where I sat I could read those magic words of cheer on its flaunting label.
    “Then I’ve got the very stuff for you,” he boomed. “This is what you want. Glowing reports on all sides. Two doses, and cripples fling away their crutches and join the Beauty Chorus.”
    “I am scarcely a cripple, Mr. Ukridge,” said Lady Lakenheath, with a return of her earlier bleakness.
    “No, no! Good heavens, no! But you can’t go wrong by taking Peppo.”
    “Peppo?” said Lady Lakenheath, doubtfully.
    “It bucks you up.”
    “You think it might do me good?” asked the sufferer, wavering. There was a glitter in her eye that betrayed the hypochondriac, the woman who will try anything once.
    “Can’t fail.”
    “Well, it is most kind and thoughtful of you to have brought it. What with worrying over Leonard——”
    “I know, I know,” murmured Ukridge, in a positively bedside manner.
    “It seems so strange,” said Lady Lakenheath, “that, after I had advertised in all the papers, someone did not find him.”
    “Perhaps someone did find him!” said Ukridge, darkly.
    “You think he must have been stolen?”
    “I am convinced of it. A beautiful parrot like Leonard, able to talk in six languages——”
    “And sing,” murmured Lady Lakenheath.
    “——and sing,” added Ukridge, “is worth a lot of money. But don’t you worry, old—er—don’t you worry. If the investigations which I am conducting now are successful, you will have Leonard back safe and sound to-morrow.”
    “To-morrow?”
    “Absolutely to-morrow. Now tell me all about your malaria.”
    I felt that the time had come for me to leave. It was not merely that the conversation had taken a purely medical turn and that I was practically excluded from it; what was really driving me away was the imperative necessity of getting out in the open somewhere and thinking. My brain was whirling. The world seemed to have become suddenly full of significant and disturbing parrots. I seized my hat and rose. My hostess was able to take only an absent-minded interest in my departure. The last thing I saw as the door closed was Ukridge’s look of big-hearted tenderness as he leaned forward so as not to miss a syllable of his companion’s clinical revelations. He was not actually patting Lady Lakenheath’s hand and telling her to be a brave little woman, but short of that he appeared to be doing everything a man could do to show her that, rugged though his exterior might be, his heart was in the right place and aching for her troubles.
    I walked back to my rooms. I walked slowly and pensively, bumping into lamp-posts and pedestrians. It was a relief, when I finally reached Ebury Street, to find Ukridge smoking on my sofa. I was resolved that before he left he should explain what this was all about, if I had to wrench the truth from him.
    “Hallo, laddie!” he said. “Upon my Sam, Corky, old horse, did you ever in your puff hear of anything so astounding as our meeting like that? Hope you didn’t mind my pretending not to know you. The fact is my position in that house——What the dickens were you doing there, by the way?”
    “I’m helping Lady Lakenheath prepare her husband’s memoirs.”
    “Of course, yes. I remember hearing her say she was going to rope in someone. But what a dashed extraordinary thing it should be you! However, where was I? Oh, yes. My position in the house, Corky, is so delicate that I simply didn’t dare risk entering into any entangling alliances. What I mean to say is, if we had rushed into each other’s arms, and you had been established in the old lady’s eyes as a friend of mine, and then one of these days you had happened to make a bloomer of some kind—as you well might, laddie—and got heaved into the street on your left ear—well, you see where I would be. I should be involved in your downfall. And I solemnly assure you, laddie, that my whole existence is staked on keeping in with that female. I must get her consent!”
    “Her what?”
    “Her consent. To the marriage.”
    “The marriage?”
    Ukridge blew a cloud of smoke, and gazed through it sentimentally at the ceiling.
    “Isn’t she a perfect angel?” he breathed, softly.
    “Do you mean Lady Lakenheath?” I asked, bewildered.
    “Fool! No, Millie.”
    “Millie? The girl in blue?”
    Ukridge sighed dreamily.
    “She was wearing that blue dress when I first met her, Corky. And a hat with thingummies. It was on the Underground. I gave her my seat, and, as I hung over her, suspended by a strap, I fell in love absolutely in a flash. I give you my honest word, laddie, I fell in love with her for all eternity between Sloane Square and South Kensington stations. She got out at South Kensington. So did I. I followed her to the house, rang the bell, got the maid to show me in, and, once I was in, put up a yarn about being misdirected and coming to the wrong address and all that sort of thing. I think they thought I was looney or trying to sell life insurance or something, but I didn’t mind that. A few days later I called, and after that I hung about, keeping an eye on their movements, met ’em everywhere they went, and bowed and passed a word and generally made my presence felt, and—well, to cut a long story short, old horse, we’re engaged. I happened to find out that Millie was in the habit of taking the dog for a run in Kensington Gardens every morning at eleven, and after that things began to move. It took a bit of doing, of course, getting up so early, but I was on the spot every day and we talked and bunged sticks for the dog, and—well, as I say, we’re engaged. She is the most amazing, wonderful girl, laddie, that you ever encountered in your life.”
    I had listened to this recital dumbly. The thing was too cataclysmal for my mind. It overwhelmed me.
    “But——” I began.
    “But,” said Ukridge, “the news has yet to be broken to the old lady, and I am striving with every nerve in my body, with every fibre of my brain, old horse, to get in right with her. That is why I brought her that Peppo. Not much, you may say, but every little helps. Shows zeal. Nothing like zeal. But, of course, what I’m really relying on is the parrot. That’s my ace of trumps.”
    I passed a hand over my corrugated forehead.
    “The parrot!” I said, feebly. “Explain about the parrot.” Ukridge eyed me with honest astonishment.
    “Do you mean to tell me you haven’t got on to that? A man of your intelligence! Corky, you amaze me. Why, I pinched it, of course. Or, rather, Millie and I pinched it together. Millie—a girl in a million, laddie!—put the bird in a string-bag one night when her aunt was dining out and lowered it to me out of the drawing-room window. And I’ve been keeping it in the background till the moment was ripe for the spectacular return. Wouldn’t have done to take it back at once. Bad strategy. Wiser to hold it in reserve for a few days and show zeal and work up the interest. Millie and I are building on the old lady’s being so supremely bucked at having the bird restored to her that there will be nothing she won’t be willing to do for me.”
    “But what do you want to dump the thing in my rooms for?” I demanded, reminded of my grievance. “I never got such a shock as when that damned hat-box began to back-chat at me.”
    “I’m sorry, old man, but it had to be. I could never tell that the old lady might not take it into her head to come round to my rooms about something. I’d thrown out—mistakenly, I realise now—an occasional suggestion about tea there some afternoon. So I had to park the bird with you. I’ll take it away to-morrow.”
    “You’ll take it away to-night!”
    “Not to-night, old man,” pleaded Ukridge. “First thing to-morrow. You won’t find it any trouble. Just throw it a word or two every now and then and give it a bit of bread dipped in tea or something, and you won’t have to worry about it at all. And I’ll be round by noon at the latest to take it away. May Heaven reward you, laddie, for the way you have stood by me this day!”
    For a man like myself, who finds at least eight hours of sleep essential if that schoolgirl complexion is to be preserved, it was unfortunate that Leonard the parrot should have proved to be a bird of high-strung temperament, easily upset. The experiences which he had undergone since leaving home had, I was to discover, jarred his nervous system. He was reasonably tranquil during the hours preceding bedtime, and had started his beauty-sleep before I myself turned in; but at two in the morning something in the nature of a nightmare must have attacked him, for I was wrenched from slumber by the sound of a hoarse soliloquy in what I took to be some native dialect. This lasted without a break till two-fifteen, when he made a noise like a steam-riveter for some moments; after which, apparently soothed, he fell asleep again. I dropped off at about three, and at three-thirty was awakened by the strains of a deep-sea chanty. From then on our periods of sleep never seemed to coincide. It was a wearing night, and before I went out after breakfast I left imperative instructions with Bowles for Ukridge, on arrival, to be informed that, if anything went wrong with his plans for removing my guest that day, the mortality statistics among parrots would take an up-curve. Returning to my rooms in the evening, I was pleased to see that this manifesto had been taken to heart. The hat-box was gone, and about six o’clock Ukridge appeared, so beaming and effervescent that I understood what had happened before he spoke. “Corky, my boy,” he said, vehemently, “this is the maddest, merriest day of all the glad New Year, and you can quote me as saying so!”
    “Lady Lakenheath has given her consent?”
    “Not merely given it, but bestowed it blithely, jubilantly.”
    “It beats me,” I said.
    “What beats you?” demanded Ukridge, sensitive to the jarring note.
    “Well, I don’t want to cast any aspersions, but I should have thought the first thing she would have done would be to make searching enquiries about your financial position.”
    “My financial position? What’s wrong with my financial position? I’ve got considerably over fifty quid in the bank, and I’m on the eve of making an enormous fortune out of this Peppo stuff.”
    “And that satisfied Lady Lakenheath?” I said, incredulously.
    Ukridge hesitated for a moment.
    “Well, to be absolutely frank, laddie,” he admitted, “I have an idea that she rather supposes that in the matter of financing the venture my aunt will rally round and keep things going till I am on my feet.”
    “Your aunt! But your aunt has finally and definitely disowned you.”
    “Yes. To be perfectly accurate, she has. But the old lady doesn’t know that. In fact, I rather made a point of keeping it from her. You see, I found it necessary, as things turned out, to play my aunt as my ace of trumps.”
    “You told me the parrot was your ace of trumps.”
    “I know I did. But these things slip up at the last moment. She seethed with gratitude about the bird, but when I seized the opportunity to ask her for her blessing I was shocked to see that she put her ears back and jibbed. Got that nasty steely look in her eyes and began to talk about clandestine meetings and things being kept from her. It was an occasion for the swiftest thinking, laddie. I got an inspiration. I played up my aunt. It worked like magic. It seems the old lady has long been an admirer of her novels, and has always wanted to meet her. She went down and out for the full count the moment I introduced my aunt into the conversation, and I have had no trouble with her since.”
    “Have you thought what is going to happen when they do meet? I can’t see your aunt delivering a striking testimonial to your merits.”
    “That’s all right. The fact of the matter is, luck has stood by me in the most amazing way all through. It happens that my aunt is out of town. She’s down at her cottage in Sussex finishing a novel, and on Saturday she sails for America on a lecturing tour.”
    “How did you find that out?”
    “Another bit of luck. I ran into her new secretary, a bloke named Wassick, at the Savage smoker last Saturday. There’s no chance of their meeting. When my aunt’s finishing a novel, she won’t read letters or telegrams, so it’s no good the old lady trying to get a communication through to her. It’s Wednesday now, she sails on Saturday, she will be away six months—why, damme, by the time she hears of the thing I shall be an old married man.”
    It had been arranged between my employer and myself during the preliminary negotiations that I should give up my afternoons to the memoirs and that the most convenient plan would be for me to present myself at Thurloe Square daily at three o’clock. I had just settled myself on the following day in the ground-floor study when the girl Millie came in, carrying papers.
    “My aunt asked me to give you these,” she said. “They are Uncle Rupert’s letters home for the year 1889.”
    I looked at her with interest and something bordering on awe. This was the girl who had actually committed herself to the appalling task of going through life as Mrs. Stanley Featherstonehaugh Ukridge—and, what is more, seemed to like the prospect. Of such stuff are heroines made.
    “Thank you,” I said, putting the papers on the desk. “By the way, may I—I hope you will——What I mean is, Ukridge told me all about it. I hope you will be very happy.”
    Her face fit up. She really was the most delightful girl to look at I had ever met. I could not blame Ukridge for falling in love with her.
    “Thank you very much,” she said. She sat in the huge arm-chair, looking very small. “Stanley has been telling me what friends you and he are. He is devoted to you.”
    “Great chap!” I said, heartily. I would have said anything which I thought would please her. She exercised a spell, this girl. “We were at school together.”