Ukridge, page 12
part #2 of Ukridge Series
And yet he did not seem pleased. His usually expressionless face was contorted with pain and displeasure. For the first time in the entire proceedings he appeared genuinely moved. Watching him closely, I could see his lips moving, perhaps in prayer. And as Mr Todd, bounding from the ropes, advanced upon him, he licked those lips. He licked them in a sinister meaning way, and his right hand dropped slowly down below his knee.
Alf Todd came on. He came jauntily and in the manner of one moving to a feast or festival. This was the end of a perfect day, and he knew it. He eyed Battling Billson as if the latter had been a pot of beer. But for the fact that he came of a restrained and unemotional race, he would doubtless have burst into song. He shot out his left and it landed on Mr Billson’s nose. Nothing happened. He drew back his right and poised it almost lovingly for a moment. It was during this moment that Battling Billson came to life.
To Alf Todd it must have seemed like a resurrection. For the last two minutes he had been testing in every way known to science his theory that this man before him no longer possessed the shadow of a punch, and the theory had seemed proven up to the hilt. Yet here he was now behaving like an unleashed whirlwind. A disquieting experience. The ropes collided with the small of Alf Todd’s back. Something else collided with his chin. He endeavoured to withdraw, but a pulpy glove took him on the odd fungoid growth which he was accustomed laughingly to call his ear. Another glove impinged upon his jaw. And there the matter ended for Alf Todd.
“Battling Billson is the winner,” intoned the vicar.
“Wow!” shouted the congregation.
“Whew!” breathed Ukridge in my ear.
It had been a near thing, but the old firm had pulled through at the finish.
Ukridge bounded off to the dressing-room to give his Battler a manager’s blessing; and presently, the next fight proving something of an anti-climax after all the fevered stress of its predecessor, I left the building and went home. I was smoking a last pipe before going to bed when a violent ring at the front-door bell broke in on my meditations. It was followed by the voice of Ukridge in the hall.
I was a little surprised. I had not been expecting to see Ukridge again to-night. His intention when we parted at the Universal had been to reward Mr Billson with a bit of supper; and, as the Battler had a coy distaste for the taverns of the West End, this involved a journey to the far East, where in congenial surroundings the coming champion would drink a good deal of beer and eat more hard-boiled eggs than you would have believed possible. The fact that the host was now thundering up my stairs seemed to indicate that the feast had fallen through. And the fact that the feast had fallen through suggested that something had gone wrong.
“Give me a drink, old horse,” said Ukridge, bursting into the room.
“What on earth’s the matter?”
“Nothing, old horse, nothing. I’m a ruined man, that’sall.” He leaped feverishly at the decanter and siphon which Bowles bad placed upon the table. I watched him with concern. This could be no ordinary tragedy that had changed him thus from the ebullient creature of joy who had left me at the Universal. A thought flashed through my mind that Baffling Billson must have been disqualified—to be rejected a moment later, when I remembered that fighters are not disqualified as an after-thought half an hour after the fight. But what else could have brought about this anguish? If ever there was an occasion for solemn rejoicing, now would have seemed to be the time.
“What’s the matter?” I asked again.
“Matter? I’ll tell you what’s the matter,” moaned Ukridge. He splashed seltzer into his glass. He reminded me of King Lear. “Do you know how much I get out of that fight to-night? Ten quid! Just ten rotten contemptible sovereigns! That’s what’s the matter.”
“I don’t understand.”
“The purse was thirty pounds. Twenty for the winner. My share is ten. Ten, I’ll trouble you! What in the name of everything infernal is the good of ten quid?”
“But you said Billson told you—”
“Yes, I know I did. Two hundred was what he told me he was to get. And the weak-minded, furtive, under-handed son of Belial didn’t explain that he was to get it for losing!”
“Losing?”
“Yes. He was to get it for losing. Some fellows who wanted a chance to do fight.” some heavy betting persuaded him to sell the “But he didn’t sell the fight.”
“I know that, dammit. That’s the whole trouble. And do you know why he didn’t? I’ll tell you. Just as he was all ready to let himself be knocked out in that fifth round, the other bloke happened to tread on his in-growing toe-nail, and that made him so mad that he forgot about everything else and sailed in and hammered the stuffing out of him. I ask you, laddie! I appeal to you as a reasonable man. Have you ever in your life heard of such a footling, idiotic, woollen-headed proceeding? Throwing away a fortune, an absolute dashed fortune, purely to gratify a momentary whim! Hurling away wealth beyond the dreams of avarice simply because a bloke stamped on his in-growing toenail. His in-growing toe-nail!” Ukridge laughed raspingly. “What right has a boxer to have an in-growing toe-nail? And if he has an in-growing toe-nail, surely—my gosh!—he can stand a little trifling discomfort for half a minute. The fact of the matter is, old horse, boxers aren’t what they were. Degenerate, laddie, absolutely degenerate. No heart. No courage. No self-respect. No vision. The old bulldog breed has disappeared entirely.”
And with a moody nod Stanley Featherstonehaugh Ukridge passed out into the night.
CHAPTER VI
Ukridge Sees her Through
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 atall. 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.
“Gorky, 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 got 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.
