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

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 anticlimax 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 tonight. 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’s all.”

He leaped feverishly at the decanter and siphon which Bowles had 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 Battling Billson must have been disqualified⁠—to be rejected a moment later, when I remembered that fighters are not disqualified as an afterthought 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 tonight? 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, underhanded 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 some heavy betting persuaded him to sell the fight.”

“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 ingrowing toenail, 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 ingrowing toenail. His ingrowing toenail!” Ukridge laughed raspingly. “What right has a boxer to have an ingrowing toenail? And if he has an ingrowing toenail, 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.

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.