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

“Yes, Aunt Elizabeth?” she said.

“Mr. Ukridge,” announced the maid at the door.

It seemed to me that if this sort of thing was to continue, if existence was to become a mere series of shocks and surprises, Peppo would have to be installed as an essential factor in my life. I stared speechlessly at Ukridge as he breezed in with the unmistakable air of sunny confidence which a man shows on familiar ground. Even if I had not had Lady Lakenheath’s words as evidence, his manner would have been enough to tell me that he was a frequent visitor in her drawing-room; and how he had come to be on calling terms with a lady so preeminently respectable it was beyond me to imagine. I awoke from my stupor to find that we were being introduced, and that Ukridge, for some reason clear, no doubt, to his own tortuous mind but inexplicable to me, was treating me as a complete stranger. He nodded courteously but distantly, and I, falling in with his unspoken wishes, nodded back. Plainly relieved, he turned to Lady Lakenheath and plunged forthwith into the talk of intimacy.

“I’ve got good news for you,” he said. “News about Leonard.”

The alteration in our hostess’s manner at these words was remarkable. Her somewhat forbidding manner softened in an instant to quite a tremulous fluttering. Gone was the hauteur which had caused her but a moment back to allude to him as “that extraordinary man.” She pressed tea upon him, and scones.

“Oh, Mr. Ukridge!” she cried.

“I don’t want to rouse false hopes and all that sort of thing, laddie⁠—I mean, Lady Lakenheath, but, upon my Sam, I really believe I am on the track. I have been making the most assiduous enquiries.”

“How very kind of you!”

“No, no,” said Ukridge, modestly.

“I have been so worried,” said Lady Lakenheath, “that I have scarcely been able to rest.”

“Too bad!”

“Last night I had a return of my wretched malaria.”

At these words, as if he had been given a cue, Ukridge reached under his chair and produced from his hat, like some conjurer, a bottle that was own brother to the one he had left in my rooms. Even from where I sat I could read those magic words of cheer on its flaunting label.

“Then I’ve got the very stuff for you,” he boomed. “This is what you want. Glowing reports on all sides. Two doses, and cripples fling away their crutches and join the Beauty Chorus.”

“I am scarcely a cripple, Mr. Ukridge,” said Lady Lakenheath, with a return of her earlier bleakness.

“No, no! Good heavens, no! But you can’t go wrong by taking Peppo.”

“Peppo?” said Lady Lakenheath, doubtfully.

“It bucks you up.”

“You think it might do me good?” asked the sufferer, wavering. There was a glitter in her eye that betrayed the hypochondriac, the woman who will try anything once.

“Can’t fail.”

“Well, it is most kind and thoughtful of you to have brought it. What with worrying over Leonard⁠—”

“I know, I know,” murmured Ukridge, in a positively bedside manner.

“It seems so strange,” said Lady Lakenheath, “that, after I had advertised in all the papers, someone did not find him.”

“Perhaps someone did find him!” said Ukridge, darkly.

“You think he must have been stolen?”

“I am convinced of it. A beautiful parrot like Leonard, able to talk in six languages⁠—”

“And sing,” murmured Lady Lakenheath.

“⁠⸺⁠and sing,” added Ukridge, “is worth a lot of money. But don’t you worry, old⁠—er⁠—don’t you worry. If the investigations which I am conducting now are successful, you will have Leonard back safe and sound tomorrow.”

“Tomorrow?”

“Absolutely tomorrow. Now tell me all about your malaria.”

I felt that the time had come for me to leave. It was not merely that the conversation had taken a purely medical turn and that I was practically excluded from it; what was really driving me away was the imperative necessity of getting out in the open somewhere and thinking. My brain was whirling. The world seemed to have become suddenly full of significant and disturbing parrots. I seized my hat and rose. My hostess was able to take only an absentminded interest in my departure. The last thing I saw as the door closed was Ukridge’s look of bighearted tenderness as he leaned forward so as not to miss a syllable of his companion’s clinical revelations. He was not actually patting Lady Lakenheath’s hand and telling her to be a brave little woman, but short of that he appeared to be doing everything a man could do to show her that, rugged though his exterior might be, his heart was in the right place and aching for her troubles.

I walked back to my rooms. I walked slowly and pensively, bumping into lampposts and pedestrians. It was a relief, when I finally reached Ebury Street, to find Ukridge smoking on my sofa. I was resolved that before he left he should explain what this was all about, if I had to wrench the truth from him.

“Hallo, laddie!” he said. “Upon my Sam, Corky, old horse, did you ever in your puff hear of anything so astounding as our meeting like that? Hope you didn’t mind my pretending not to know you. The fact is my position in that house⁠—What the dickens were you doing there, by the way?”

“I’m helping Lady Lakenheath prepare her husband’s memoirs.”

“Of course, yes. I remember hearing her say she was going to rope in someone. But what a dashed extraordinary thing it should be you! However, where was I? Oh, yes. My position in the house, Corky, is so delicate that I simply didn’t dare risk entering into any entangling alliances. What I mean to say is, if we had rushed into each other’s arms, and you had been established in the old lady’s eyes as a friend of mine, and then one of these days you had happened to make a bloomer of some kind⁠—as you well might, laddie⁠—and got heaved into the street on your left ear⁠—well, you see where I would be. I should be involved