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

“The man,” I exclaimed, with fanatical enthusiasm, “is a perfect Sir Galahad!”

“Isn’t he? Why, only the other day⁠—”

She was interrupted. Outside, the front door slammed. There came a pounding of large feet in the passage. The door of the study flew open, and Sir Galahad himself charged in, his arms full of parcels.

“Corky!” he began. Then, perceiving his future wife, who had risen from the chair in alarm, he gazed at her with a wild pity in his eyes, as one who has bad news to spring. “Millie, old girl,” he said, feverishly, “we’re in the soup!”

The girl clutched the table.

“Oh, Stanley, darling!”

“There is just one hope. It occurred to me as I was⁠—”

“You don’t mean that Aunt Elizabeth has changed her mind?”

“She hasn’t yet. But,” said Ukridge, grimly, “she’s pretty soon going to, unless we move with the utmost despatch.”

“But what has happened?”

Ukridge shed the parcels. The action seemed to make him calmer.

“We had just come out of Harrod’s,” he said, “and I was about to leg it home with these parcels, when she sprang it on me! Right out of a blue sky!”

“What, Stanley, dear? Sprang what?”

“This ghastly thing. This frightful news that she proposes to attend the dinner of the Pen and Ink Club on Friday night. I saw her talking to a pug-nosed female we met in the fruit, vegetable, birds, and pet dogs department, but I never guessed what they were talking about. She was inviting the old lady to that infernal dinner!”

“But, Stanley, why shouldn’t Aunt Elizabeth go to the Pen and Ink Club dinner?”

“Because my aunt is coming up to town on Friday specially to speak at that dinner, and your aunt is going to make a point of introducing herself and having a long chat about me.”

We gazed at one another silently. There was no disguising the gravity of the news. Like the coming together of two uncongenial chemicals, this meeting of aunt with aunt must inevitably produce an explosion. And in that explosion would perish the hopes and dreams of two loving hearts.

“Oh, Stanley! What can we do?”

If the question had been directed at me, I should have been hard put to it to answer; but Ukridge, that man of resource, though he might be down, was never out.

“There is just one scheme. It occurred to me as I was sprinting along the Brompton Road. Laddie,” he proceeded, laying a heavy hand on my shoulder, “it involves your cooperation.”

“Oh, how splendid!” cried Millie.

It was not quite the comment I would have made myself. She proceeded to explain.

“Mr. Corcoran is so clever. I’m sure, if it’s anything that can be done, he will do it.”

This ruled me out as a potential resister. Ukridge I might have been able to withstand, but so potently had this girl’s spell worked upon me that in her hands I was as wax.

Ukridge sat down on the desk, and spoke with a tenseness befitting the occasion.

“It’s rummy in this life, laddie,” he began in moralising vein, “how the rottenest times a fellow goes through may often do him a bit of good in the end. I don’t suppose I have ever enjoyed any period of my existence less than those months I spent at my aunt’s house in Wimbledon. But mark the sequel, old horse! It was while going through that ghastly experience that I gained a knowledge of her habits which is going to save us now. You remember Dora Mason?”

“Who is Dora Mason?” enquired Millie, quickly.

“A plain, elderly sort of female who used to be my aunt’s secretary,” replied Ukridge, with equal promptness.

Personally, I remembered Miss Mason as a rather unusually pretty and attractive girl, but I felt that it would be injudicious to say so. I contented myself with making a mental note to the effect that Ukridge, whatever his drawbacks as a husband, had at any rate that ready tact which is so helpful in the home.

“Miss Mason,” he proceeded, speaking, I thought, in a manner a shade more careful and measured, “used to talk to me about her job from time to time. I was sorry for the poor old thing, you understand, because hers was a grey life, and I made rather a point of trying to cheer her up now and then.”

“How like you, dear!”

It was not I who spoke⁠—it was Millie. She regarded her betrothed with shining and admiring eyes, and I could see that she was thinking that my description of him as a modern Galahad was altogether too tame.

“And one of the things she told me,” continued Ukridge, “was that my aunt, though she’s always speaking at these bally dinners, can’t say a word unless she has her speech written for her and memorises it. Miss Mason swore solemnly to me that she had written every word my aunt had spoken in public in the last two years. You begin to get on to the scheme, laddie? The long and the short of it is that we must get hold of that speech she’s going to deliver at the Pen and Ink Club binge. We must intercept it, old horse, before it can reach her. We shall thus spike her guns. Collar that speech, Corky, old man, before she can get her hooks on it, and you can take it from me that she’ll find she has a headache on Friday night and can’t appear.”

There stole over me that sickening conviction that comes to those in peril that I was for it.

“But it may be too late,” I faltered, with a last feeble effort at self-preservation. “She may have the speech already.”

“Not a chance. I know what she’s like when she’s finishing one of these beastly books. No distractions of any sort are permitted. Wassick, the secretary bloke, will have had instructions to send the thing to her by registered post to arrive Friday morning, so that she can study it in the train. Now, listen carefully, laddie, for I have thought this thing out