Ukridge Stories - P. G. Wodehouse (e book free reading TXT) 📗

of two pounds six shillings, and we asked Teddy Weeks if he thought that he could get adequately keyed up within the limits of that sum.

“I’ll try,” said Teddy Weeks.

So, not unmindful of the fact that that excellent hostelry supplied champagne at eight shillings the quart bottle, we fixed the meeting for seven o’clock at Barolini’s.

Considered as a social affair, Teddy Weeks’s keying-up dinner was not a success. Almost from the start I think we all found it trying. It was not so much the fact that he was drinking deeply of Barolini’s eight-shilling champagne while we, from lack of funds, were compelled to confine ourselves to meaner beverages; what really marred the pleasantness of the function was the extraordinary effect the stuff had on Teddy. What was actually in the champagne supplied to Barolini and purveyed by him to the public, such as were reckless enough to drink it, at eight shillings the bottle remains a secret between its maker and his Maker; but three glasses of it were enough to convert Teddy Weeks from a mild and rather oily young man into a truculent swashbuckler.

He quarrelled with us all. With the soup he was tilting at Victor Beamish’s theories of Art; the fish found him ridiculing Bertram Fox’s views on the future of the motion picture; and by the time the leg of chicken with dandelion salad arrived⁠—or, as some held, string salad⁠—opinions varied on this point⁠—the hell-brew had so wrought on him that he had begun to lecture Ukridge on his misspent life and was urging him in accents audible across the street to go out and get a job and thus acquire sufficient self-respect to enable him to look himself in the face in a mirror without wincing. Not, added Teddy Weeks with what we all thought uncalled-for offensiveness, that any amount of self-respect was likely to do that. Having said which, he called imperiously for another eight bobs’-worth.

We gazed at one another wanly. However excellent the end towards which all this was tending, there was no denying that it was hard to bear. But policy kept us silent. We recognised that this was Teddy Weeks’s evening and that he must be humoured. Victor Beamish said meekly that Teddy had cleared up a lot of points which had been troubling him for a long time. Bertram Fox agreed that there was much in what Teddy had said about the future of the closeup. And even Ukridge, though his haughty soul was seared to its foundations by the latter’s personal remarks, promised to take his homily to heart and act upon it at the earliest possible moment.

“You’d better!” said Teddy Weeks, belligerently, biting off the end of one of Barolini’s best cigars. “And there’s another thing⁠—don’t let me hear of your coming and sneaking people’s socks again.”

“Very well, laddie,” said Ukridge, humbly.

“If there is one person in the world that I despise,” said Teddy, bending a red-eyed gaze on the offender, “it’s a snock-seeker⁠—a seek-snocker⁠—a⁠—well, you know what I mean.”

We hastened to assure him that we knew what he meant and he relapsed into a lengthy stupor, from which he emerged three-quarters of an hour later to announce that he didn’t know what we intended to do, but that he was going. We said that we were going too, and we paid the bill and did so.

Teddy Weeks’s indignation on discovering us gathered about him upon the pavement outside the restaurant was intense, and he expressed it freely. Among other things, he said⁠—which was not true⁠—that he had a reputation to keep up in Soho.

“It’s all right, Teddy, old horse,” said Ukridge, soothingly. “We just thought you would like to have all your old pals round you when you did it.”

“Did it? Did what?”

“Why, had the accident.”

Teddy Weeks glared at him truculently. Then his mood seemed to change abruptly, and he burst into a loud and hearty laugh.

“Well, of all the silly ideas!” he cried, amusedly. “I’m not going to have an accident. You don’t suppose I ever seriously intended to have an accident, do you? It was just my fun.” Then, with another sudden change of mood, he seemed to become a victim to an acute unhappiness. He stroked Ukridge’s arm affectionately, and a tear rolled down his cheek. “Just my fun,” he repeated. “You don’t mind my fun, do you?” he asked, pleadingly. “You like my fun, don’t you? All my fun. Never meant to have an accident at all. Just wanted dinner.” The gay humour of it all overcame his sorrow once more. “Funniest thing ever heard,” he said cordially. “Didn’t want accident, wanted dinner. Dinner daxident, danner dixident,” he added, driving home his point. “Well, good night all,” he said, cheerily. And, stepping off the kerb on to a banana-skin, was instantly knocked ten feet by a passing lorry.

“Two ribs and an arm,” said the doctor five minutes later, superintending the removal proceedings. “Gently with that stretcher.”

It was two weeks before we were informed by the authorities of Charing Cross Hospital that the patient was in a condition to receive visitors. A whip-round secured the price of a basket of fruit, and Ukridge and I were deputed by the shareholders to deliver it with their compliments and kind enquiries.

“Hallo!” we said in a hushed, bedside manner when finally admitted to his presence.

“Sit down, gentlemen,” replied the invalid.

I must confess even in that first moment to having experienced a slight feeling of surprise. It was not like Teddy Weeks to call us gentlemen. Ukridge, however, seemed to notice nothing amiss.

“Well, well, well,” he said, buoyantly. “And how are you, laddie? We’ve brought you a few fragments of fruit.”

“I am getting along capitally,” replied Teddy Weeks, still in that odd precise way which had made his opening words strike me as curious. “And I should like to say that in my opinion England has reason to be proud of the alertness and enterprise of her great journals. The excellence of their reading-matter, the ingenuity of