Ukridge Rounds a Nasty Corner - (2)

“I know. He is always talking about it.” She looked at me with round eyes exactly like a Persian kitten’s. “I suppose you will be his best man?” She bubbled with happy laughter. “At one time I was awfully afraid there wouldn’t be any need for a best man. Do you think it was very wrong of us to steal Aunt Elizabeth’s parrot?”
    “Wrong?” I said, stoutly. “Not a bit of it. What an idea!”
    “She was terribly worried,” argued the girl.
    “Best thing in the world,” I assured her. “Too much peace of mind leads to premature old age.”
    “All the same, I have never felt so wicked and ashamed of myself. And I know Stanley felt just like that, too.”
    “I bet he did!” I agreed, effusively. Such was the magic of this Dresden china child that even her preposterous suggestion that Ukridge possessed a conscience could not shake me.
    “He’s so wonderful and chivalrous and considerate.”
    “The very words I should have used myself!”
    “Why, to show you what a beautiful nature he has, he’s gone out now with my aunt to help her do her shopping.”
    “You don’t say so!”
    “Just to try to make it up to her, you see, for the anxiety we caused her.”
    “It’s noble! That’s what it is. Absolutely noble!”
    “And if there’s one thing in the world he loathes it is carrying parcels.”
    “The man,” I exclaimed, with fanatical enthusiasm, “is a perfect Sir Galahad!”
    “Isn’t he? Why, only the other day——”
    She was interrupted. Outside, the front door slammed. There came a pounding of large feet in the passage. The door of the study flew open, and Sir Galahad himself charged in, his arms full of parcels.
    “Corky!” he began. Then, perceiving his future wife, who had risen from the chair in alarm, he gazed at her with a wild pity in his eyes, as one who has bad news to spring. “Millie, old girl,” he said, feverishly, “we’re in the soup!”
    The girl clutched the table.
    “Oh, Stanley, darling!”
    “There is just one hope. It occurred to me as I was——”
    “You don’t mean that Aunt Elizabeth has changed her mind?”
    “She hasn’t yet. But,” said Ukridge, grimly, “she’s pretty soon going to, unless we move with the utmost despatch.”
    “But what has happened?”
    Ukridge shed the parcels. The action seemed to make him calmer.
    “We had just come out of Harrod’s,” he said, “and I was about to leg it home with these parcels, when she sprang it on me! Right out of a blue sky!”
    “What, Stanley, dear? Sprang what?”
    “This ghastly thing. This frightful news that she proposes to attend the dinner of the Pen and Ink Club on Friday night. I saw her talking to a pug-nosed female we met in the fruit, vegetable, birds, and pet dogs department, but I never guessed what they were talking about. She was inviting the old lady to that infernal dinner!”
    “But, Stanley, why shouldn’t Aunt Elizabeth go to the Pen and Ink Club dinner?”
    “Because my aunt is coming up to town on Friday specially to speak at that dinner, and your aunt is going to make a point of introducing herself and having a long chat about me.”
    We gazed at one another silently. There was no disguising the gravity of the news. Like the coming together of two uncongenial chemicals, this meeting of aunt with aunt must inevitably produce an explosion. And in that explosion would perish the hopes and dreams of two loving hearts.
    “Oh, Stanley! What can we do?”
    If the question had been directed at me, I should have been hard put to it to answer; but Ukridge, that man of resource, though he might be down, was never out.
    “There is just one scheme. It occurred to me as I was sprinting along the Brompton Road. Laddie,” he proceeded, laying a heavy hand on my shoulder, “it involves your co-operation.”
    “Oh, how splendid!” cried Millie.
    It was not quite the comment I would have made myself. She proceeded to explain.
    “Mr. Corcoran is so clever. I’m sure, if it’s anything that can be done, he will do it.”
    This ruled me out as a potential resister. Ukridge I might have been able to withstand, but so potently had this girl’s spell worked upon me that in her hands I was as wax.
    Ukridge sat down on the desk, and spoke with a tenseness befitting the occasion.
    “It’s rummy in this life, laddie,” he began in moralising vein, “how the rottenest times a fellow goes through may often do him a bit of good in the end. I don’t suppose I have ever enjoyed any period of my existence less than those months I spent at my aunt’s house in Wimbledon. But mark the sequel, old horse! It was while going through that ghastly experience that I gained a knowledge of her habits which is going to save us now. You remember Dora Mason?”
    “Who is Dora Mason?” enquired Millie, quickly.
    “A plain, elderly sort of female who used to be my aunt’s secretary,” replied Ukridge, with equal promptness.
    Personally, I remembered Miss Mason as a rather unusually pretty and attractive girl, but I felt that it would be injudicious to say so. I contented myself with making a mental note to the effect that Ukridge, whatever his drawbacks as a husband, had at any rate that ready tact which is so helpful in the home.
    “Miss Mason,” he proceeded, speaking, I thought, in a manner a shade more careful and measured, “used to talk to me about her job from time to time. I was sorry for the poor old thing, you understand, because hers was a grey life, and I made rather a point of trying to cheer her up now and then.”
    “How like you, dear!”
    It was not I who spoke—it was Millie. She regarded her betrothed with shining and admiring eyes, and I could see that she was thinking that my description of him as a modern Galahad was altogether too tame.
    “And one of the things she told me,” continued Ukridge, “was that my aunt, though she’s always speaking at these bally dinners, can’t say a word unless she has her speech written for her and memorises it. Miss Mason swore solemnly to me that she had written every word my aunt had spoken in public in the last two years. You begin to get on to the scheme, laddie? The long and the short of it is that we must get hold of that speech she’s going to deliver at the Pen and Ink Club binge. We must intercept it, old horse, before it can reach her. We shall thus spike her guns. Collar that speech, Corky, old man, before she can get her hooks on it, and you can take it from me that she’ll find she has a headache on Friday night and can’t appear.”
    There stole over me that sickening conviction that comes to those in peril that I was for it.
    “But it may be too late,” I faltered, with a last feeble effort at self-preservation. “She may have the speech already.”
    “Not a chance. I know what she’s like when she’s finishing one of these beastly books. No distractions of any sort are permitted. Wassick, the secretary bloke, will have had instructions to send the thing to her by registered post to arrive Friday morning, so that she can study it in the train. Now, listen carefully, laddie, for I have thought this thing out to the last detail. My aunt is at her cottage at Market Deeping, in Sussex. I don’t know how the trains go, but there’s sure to be one that’ll get me to Market Deeping to-night. Directly I arrive I shall send a wire to Wassick—signed ‘Ukridge,’” said the schemer. “I have a perfect right to sign telegrams ‘Ukridge,’” he added, virtuously, “in which I tell him to hand the speech over to a gentleman who will call for it, as arrangements have been made for him to take it down to the cottage. All you have to do is to call at my aunt’s house, see Wassick—a splendid fellow, and just the sort of chump who won’t suspect a thing—get the manuscript, and biff off. Once round the corner, you dump it in the nearest garbage-box, and all is well.”
    “Isn’t he wonderful, Mr. Corcoran?” cried Millie.
    “I can rely on you, Corky? You will not let me down over your end of the business?”
    “You will do this for us, Mr. Corcoran, won’t you?” pleaded Millie.
    I gave one look at her. Her Persian kitten eyes beamed into mine—gaily, trustfully, confidently. I gulped.
    “All right,” I said, huskily.
    A leaden premonition of impending doom weighed me down next morning as I got into the cab which was to take me to Heath House, Wimbledon Common. I tried to correct this shuddering panic, by telling myself that it was simply due to my recollection of what I had suffered at my previous visit to the place, but it refused to leave me. A black devil of apprehension sat on my shoulder all the way, and as I rang the front-door bell it seemed to me that this imp emitted a chuckle more sinister than any that had gone before. And suddenly as I waited there I understood.
    No wonder the imp had chuckled! Like a flash I perceived where the fatal flaw in this enterprise lay. It was just like Ukridge, poor impetuous, woollen-headed ass, not to have spotted it; but that I myself should have overlooked it was bitter indeed. The simple fact which had escaped our joint attention was this—that, as I had visited the house before, the butler would recognise me. I might succeed in purloining the speech, but it would be reported to the Woman Up Top that the mysterious visitor who had called for the manuscript was none other than the loathly Mr. Corcoran of hideous memory—and what would happen then? Prosecution? Jail? Social ruin?
    I was on the very point of retreating down the steps when the door was flung open, and there swept over me the most exquisite relief I have ever known.
    It was a new butler who stood before me.
    “Well?”
    He did not actually speak the word, but he had a pair of those expressive, beetling eyebrows, and they said it for him. A most forbidding man, fully as grim and austere as his predecessor.
    “I wish to see Mr. Wassick,” I said, firmly.
    The butler’s manner betrayed no cordiality, but he evidently saw that I was not to be trifled with. He led the way down that familiar hall, and presently I was in the drawing-room, being inspected once more by the six Pekingese, who, as on that other occasion, left their baskets, smelt me, registered disappointment, and made for their baskets again.
    “What name shall I say, sir?”
    I was not to be had like that.
    “Mr. Wassick is expecting me,” I replied, coldly.
    “Very good, sir.”
    I strolled buoyantly about the room, inspecting this object and that. I hummed lightly. I spoke kindly to the Pekes.
    “Hallo, you Pekes!” I said.
    I sauntered over to the mantelpiece, over which was a mirror. I was gazing at myself and thinking that it was not such a bad sort of face—not handsome, perhaps, but with a sort of something about it—when of a sudden the mirror reflected something else.
    That something was the figure of that popular novelist and well-known after-dinner speaker, Miss Julia Ukridge. “Good-morning,” she said.
    It is curious how often the gods who make sport of us poor humans defeat their own ends by overdoing the thing. Any contretemps less awful than this, however slightly less awful, would undoubtedly have left me as limp as a sheet of carbon paper, rattled and stammering, in prime condition to be made sport of. But as it was I found myself strangely cool. I had a subconscious feeling that there would be a reaction later, and that the next time I looked in a mirror I should find my hair strangely whitened, but for the moment I was unnaturally composed, and my brain buzzed like a circular-saw in an ice-box.
    “How do you do?” I heard myself say. My voice seemed to come from a long distance, but it was steady and even pleasing in timbre.
    “You wished to see me, Mr. Corcoran?”
    “Yes.”
    “Then why,” enquired Miss Ukridge, softly, “did you ask for my secretary?”
    There was that same acid sub-tinkle in her voice which had been there at our previous battle in the same ring. But that odd alertness stood by me well.
    “I understood that you were out of town,” I said.
    “Who told you that?”
    “They were saying so at the Savage Club the other night.” This seemed to hold her.
    “Why did you wish to see me?” she asked, baffled by my ready intelligence.
    “I hoped to get a few facts concerning your proposed lecture tour in America.”
    “How did you know that I was about to lecture in America?” I raised my eyebrows. This was childish.
    “They were saying so at the Savage Club,” I replied. Baffled again.
    “I had an idea, Mr. Corcoran,” she said, with a nasty gleam in her blue eyes, “that you might be the person alluded to in my nephew Stanley’s telegram.”
    “Telegram?”
    “Yes. I altered my plans and returned to London last night instead of waiting till this evening, and I had scarcely arrived when a telegram came, signed Ukridge, from the village where I had been staying. It instructed my secretary to hand over to a gentleman who would call this morning the draft of the speech which I am to deliver at the dinner of the Pen and Ink Club. I assume the thing to have been some obscure practical joke on the part of my nephew, Stanley. And I also assumed, Mr. Corcoran, that you must be the gentleman alluded to.”
    I could parry this sort of stuff all day.
    “What an odd idea!” I said.
    “You think it odd? Then why did you tell my butler that my secretary was expecting you?”
    It was the worst one yet, but I blocked it.
    “The man must have misunderstood me. He seemed,” I added, loftily, “an unintelligent sort of fellow.”
    Our eyes met in silent conflict for a brief instant, but all was well. Julia Ukridge was a civilised woman, and this handicapped her in the contest. For people may say what they like about the artificialities of modern civilisation and hold its hypocrisies up to scorn, but there is no denying that it has one outstanding merit. Whatever its defects, civilisation prevents a gently-bred lady of high standing in the literary world from calling a man a liar and punching him on the nose, however convinced she may be that he deserves it. Miss Ukridge’s hands twitched, her lips tightened, and her eyes gleamed bluely—but she restrained herself. She shrugged her shoulders.
    “What do you wish to know about my lecture tour?” she said.
    It was the white flag.
    Ukridge and I had arranged to dine together at the Regent Grill Room that night and celebrate the happy ending of his troubles. I was first at the tryst, and my heart bled for my poor friend as I noted the care-free way in which he ambled up the aisle to our table. I broke the bad news as gently as I could, and the man sagged like a filleted fish. It was not a cheery meal. I extended myself as host, plying him with rich foods and spirited young wines, but he would not be comforted. The only remark he contributed to the conversation, outside of scattered monosyllables, occurred as the waiter retired with the cigar-box.
    “What’s the time, Corky, old man?”
    I looked at my watch.
    “Just on half-past nine.”
    “About now,” said Ukridge, dully, “my aunt is starting to give the old lady an earful!”
    Lady Lakenheath was never, even at the best of times, what I should call a sparkling woman, but it seemed to me, as I sat with her at tea on the following afternoon, that her manner was more sombre than usual. She had all the earmarks of a woman who has had disturbing news. She looked, in fact, exactly like a woman who has been told by the aunt of the man who is endeavouring to marry into her respectable family the true character of that individual.
    It was not easy in the circumstances to keep the ball rolling on the subject of the ’Mgomo-’Mgomos, but I was struggling bravely, when the last thing happened which I should have predicted.
    “Mr. Ukridge,” announced the maid.
    That Ukridge should be here at all was astounding; but that he should bustle in, as he did, with that same air of being the household pet which had marked his demeanour at our first meeting in this drawing-room, soared into the very empyrean of the inexplicable. So acutely was I affected by the spectacle of this man, whom I had left on the previous night a broken hulk, behaving with the ebullience of an honoured member of the family, that I did what I had been on the verge of doing every time I had partaken of Lady Lakenheath’s hospitality—upset my tea.
    “I wonder,” said Ukridge, plunging into speech with the same old breezy abruptness, “if this stuff would be any good, Aunt Elizabeth.”
    I had got my cup balanced again as he started speaking, but at the sound of this affectionate address over it went again. Only a juggler of long experience could have manipulated Lady Lakenheath’s miniature cups and saucers successfuly under the stress of emotions such as I was experiencing.
    “What is it, Stanley?” asked Lady Lakenheath, with a flicker of interest.
    They were bending their heads over a bottle which Ukridge had pulled out of his pocket.
    “It’s some new stuff, Aunt Elizabeth. Just put on the market. Said to be excellent for parrots. Might be worth trying.”
    “It is exceedingly thoughtful of you, Stanley, to have brought it,” said Lady Lakenheath, warmly. “And I shall certainly try the effect of a dose if Leonard has another seizure. Fortunately, he seems almost himself again this afternoon.”
    “Splendid!”
    “My parrot,” said Lady Lakenheath, including me in the conversation, “had a most peculiar attack last night. I cannot account for it. His health has always been so particularly good. I was dressing for dinner at the time, and so was not present at the outset of the seizure, but my niece, who was an eye-witness of what occurred, tells me he behaved in a most unusual way. Quite suddenly, it appears, he started to sing very excitedly; then, after awhile, he stopped in the middle of a bar and appeared to be suffering. My niece, who is a most warm-hearted girl, was naturally exceedingly alarmed. She ran to fetch me, and when I came down poor Leonard was leaning against the side of his cage in an attitude of complete exhaustion, and all he would say was, ‘Have a nut!’ He repeated this several times in a low voice, and then closed his eyes and tumbled off his perch. I was up half the night with him, but now he seems mercifully to have turned the corner. This afternoon he is almost his old bright self again, and has been talking in Swahili, always a sign that he is feeling cheerful.”
    I murmured my condolences and congratulations.
    “It was particularly unfortunate,” observed Ukridge, sympathetically, “that the thing should have happened last night, because it prevented Aunt Elizabeth going to the Pen and Ink Club dinner.”
    “What!” Fortunately I had set down my cup by this time.
    “Yes,” said Lady Lakenheath, regretfully. “And I had been so looking forward to meeting Stanley’s aunt there. Miss Julia Ukridge, the novelist. I have been an admirer of hers for many years. But, with Leonard in this terrible state, naturally I could not stir from the house. His claims were paramount. I shall have to wait till Miss Ukridge returns from America.”
    “Next April,” murmured Ukridge, softly.
    “I think, if you will excuse me now, Mr. Corcoran, I will just run up and see how Leonard is.”
    The door closed.
    “Laddie,” said Ukridge, solemnly, “doesn’t this just show——”
    I gazed at him accusingly.
    “Did you poison that parrot?”
    “Me? Poison the parrot? Of course I didn’t poison the parrot. The whole thing was due to an act of mistaken kindness carried out in a spirit of the purest altruism. And, as I was saying, doesn’t it just show that no little act of kindness, however trivial, is ever wasted in the great scheme of things? One might have supposed that when I brought the old lady that bottle of Peppo the thing would have begun and ended there with a few conventional words of thanks. But mark, laddie, how all things work together for good. Millie, who, between ourselves, is absolutely a girl in a million, happened to think the bird was looking a bit off colour last night, and with a kindly anxiety to do him a bit of good, gave him a slice of bread soaked in Peppo. Thought it might brace him up. Now, what they put in that stuff, old man, I don’t know, but the fact remains that the bird almost instantly became perfectly pie-eyed. You have heard the old lady’s account of the affair, but, believe me, she doesn’t know one half of it. Millie informs me that Leonard’s behaviour had to be seen to be believed. When the old lady came down he was practically in a drunken stupor, and all to-day he has been suffering from a shocking head. If he’s really sitting up and taking notice again, it simply means that he has worked off one of the finest hangovers of the age. Let this be a lesson to you, laddie, never to let a day go by without its act of kindness. What’s the time, old horse?”
    “Getting on for five.”
    Ukridge seemed to muse for a moment, and a happy smile irradiated his face.
    “About now,” he said, complacently, “my aunt is out in the Channel somewhere. And I see by the morning paper that there is a nasty gale blowing up from the southeast!”
    THE END