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

when I met the man a week later my heart grew heavier still.

It was in Oxford Street at the hour when women come up from the suburbs to shop; and he was standing among the dogs and commissionaires outside Selfridge’s. His arms were full of parcels, his face was set in a mask of wan discomfort, and he was so beautifully dressed that for an instant I did not recognise him. Everything which the Correct Man wears was assembled on his person, from the silk hat to the patent-leather boots; and, as he confided to me in the first minute, he was suffering the tortures of the damned. The boots pinched him, the hat hurt his forehead, and the collar was worse than the hat and boots combined.

“She makes me wear them,” he said, moodily, jerking his head towards the interior of the store and uttering a sharp howl as the movement caused the collar to gouge his neck.

“Still,” I said, trying to turn his mind to happier things, “you must be having a great time. George Tupper tells me that your aunt is rich. I suppose you’re living off the fat of the land.”

“The browsing and sluicing are good,” admitted Ukridge. “But it’s a wearing life, laddie. A wearing life, old horse.”

“Why don’t you come and see me sometimes?”

“I’m not allowed out at night.”

“Well, shall I come and see you?”

A look of poignant alarm shot out from under the silk hat.

“Don’t dream of it, laddie,” said Ukridge, earnestly. “Don’t dream of it. You’re a good chap⁠—my best pal and all that sort of thing⁠—but the fact is, my standing in the home’s none too solid even now, and one sight of you would knock my prestige into hash. Aunt Julia would think you worldly.”

“I’m not worldly.”

“Well, you look worldly. You wear a squash hat and a soft collar. If you don’t mind my suggesting it, old horse, I think, if I were you, I’d pop off now before she comes out. Goodbye, laddie.”

“Ichabod!” I murmured sadly to myself as I passed on down Oxford Street. “Ichabod!”

I should have had more faith. I should have known my Ukridge better. I should have realised that a London suburb could no more imprison that great man permanently than Elba did Napoleon.

One afternoon, as I let myself into the house in Ebury Street of which I rented at that time the bedroom and sitting room on the first floor, I came upon Bowles, my landlord, standing in listening attitude at the foot of the stairs.

“Good afternoon, sir,” said Bowles. “A gentleman is waiting to see you. I fancy I heard him calling me a moment ago.”

“Who is he?”

“A Mr. Ukridge, sir. He⁠—”

A vast voice boomed out from above.

“Bowles, old horse!”

Bowles, like all other proprietors of furnished apartments in the southwestern district of London, was an ex-butler, and about him, as about all ex-butlers, there clung like a garment an aura of dignified superiority which had never failed to crush my spirit. He was a man of portly aspect, with a bald head and prominent eyes of a lightish green⁠—eyes that seemed to weigh me dispassionately and find me wanting. “H’m!” they seemed to say. “Young⁠—very young. And not at all what I have been accustomed to in the best places.” To hear this dignitary addressed⁠—and in a shout at that⁠—as “old horse” affected me with much the same sense of imminent chaos as would afflict a devout young curate if he saw his bishop slapped on the back. The shock, therefore, when he responded not merely mildly but with what almost amounted to camaraderie was numbing.

“Sir?” cooed Bowles.

“Bring me six bones and a corkscrew.”

“Very good, sir.”

Bowles retired, and I bounded upstairs and flung open the door of my sitting room.

“Great Scott!” I said, blankly.

The place was a sea of Pekingese dogs. Later investigation reduced their numbers to six, but in that first moment there seemed to be hundreds. Goggling eyes met mine wherever I looked. The room was a forest of waving tails. With his back against the mantelpiece, smoking placidly, stood Ukridge.

“Hallo, laddie!” he said, with a genial wave of the hand, as if to make me free of the place. “You’re just in time. I’ve got to dash off and catch a train in a quarter of an hour. Stop it, you mutts!” he bellowed, and the six Pekingese, who had been barking steadily since my arrival, stopped in mid-yap, and were still. Ukridge’s personality seemed to exercise a magnetism over the animal kingdom, from ex-butlers to Pekes, which bordered on the uncanny. “I’m off to Sheep’s Cray, in Kent. Taken a cottage there.”

“Are you going to live there?”

“Yes.”

“But what about your aunt?”

“Oh, I’ve left her. Life is stern and life is earnest, and if I mean to make a fortune I’ve got to bustle about and not stay cooped up in a place like Wimbledon.”

“Something in that.”

“Besides which, she told me the very sight of me made her sick and she never wanted to see me again.”

I might have guessed, directly I saw him, that some upheaval had taken place. The sumptuous raiment which had made him such a treat to the eye at our last meeting was gone, and he was back in his pre-Wimbledon costume, which was, as the advertisements say, distinctively individual. Over grey flannel trousers, a golf coat, and a brown sweater he wore like a royal robe a bright yellow mackintosh. His collar had broken free from its stud and showed a couple of inches of bare neck. His hair was disordered, and his masterful nose was topped by a pair of steel-rimmed pince-nez cunningly attached to his flapping ears with ginger-beer wire. His whole appearance spelled revolt.

Bowles manifested himself with a plateful of bones.

“That’s right. Chuck ’em down on the floor.”

“Very good, sir.”

“I like that fellow,” said Ukridge, as the door closed. “We had a dashed interesting talk before you came in. Did you know he had a cousin on the music-halls?”

“He hasn’t confided in