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

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 shorthanded 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 typewriting 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 at all. Well, goodbye, 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 northeasterly 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.

“Corky, 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 percent 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