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

to the last detail. My aunt is at her cottage at Market Deeping, in Sussex. I don’t know how the trains go, but there’s sure to be one that’ll get me to Market Deeping tonight. Directly I arrive I shall send a wire to Wassick⁠—signed ‘Ukridge,’ ” said the schemer. “I have a perfect right to sign telegrams ‘Ukridge,’ ” he added, virtuously, “in which I tell him to hand the speech over to a gentleman who will call for it, as arrangements have been made for him to take it down to the cottage. All you have to do is to call at my aunt’s house, see Wassick⁠—a splendid fellow, and just the sort of chump who won’t suspect a thing⁠—get the manuscript, and biff off. Once round the corner, you dump it in the nearest garbage-box, and all is well.”

“Isn’t he wonderful, Mr. Corcoran?” cried Millie.

“I can rely on you, Corky? You will not let me down over your end of the business?”

“You will do this for us, Mr. Corcoran, won’t you?” pleaded Millie.

I gave one look at her. Her Persian kitten eyes beamed into mine⁠—gaily, trustfully, confidently. I gulped.

“All right,” I said, huskily.

A leaden premonition of impending doom weighed me down next morning as I got into the cab which was to take me to Heath House, Wimbledon Common. I tried to correct this shuddering panic, by telling myself that it was simply due to my recollection of what I had suffered at my previous visit to the place, but it refused to leave me. A black devil of apprehension sat on my shoulder all the way, and as I rang the front-door bell it seemed to me that this imp emitted a chuckle more sinister than any that had gone before. And suddenly as I waited there I understood.

No wonder the imp had chuckled! Like a flash I perceived where the fatal flaw in this enterprise lay. It was just like Ukridge, poor impetuous, woollen-headed ass, not to have spotted it; but that I myself should have overlooked it was bitter indeed. The simple fact which had escaped our joint attention was this⁠—that, as I had visited the house before, the butler would recognise me. I might succeed in purloining the speech, but it would be reported to the Woman Up Top that the mysterious visitor who had called for the manuscript was none other than the loathly Mr. Corcoran of hideous memory⁠—and what would happen then? Prosecution? Jail? Social ruin?

I was on the very point of retreating down the steps when the door was flung open, and there swept over me the most exquisite relief I have ever known.

It was a new butler who stood before me.

“Well?”

He did not actually speak the word, but he had a pair of those expressive, beetling eyebrows, and they said it for him. A most forbidding man, fully as grim and austere as his predecessor.

“I wish to see Mr. Wassick,” I said, firmly.

The butler’s manner betrayed no cordiality, but he evidently saw that I was not to be trifled with. He led the way down that familiar hall, and presently I was in the drawing-room, being inspected once more by the six Pekingese, who, as on that other occasion, left their baskets, smelt me, registered disappointment, and made for their baskets again.

“What name shall I say, sir?”

I was not to be had like that.

“Mr. Wassick is expecting me,” I replied, coldly.

“Very good, sir.”

I strolled buoyantly about the room, inspecting this object and that. I hummed lightly. I spoke kindly to the Pekes.

“Hallo, you Pekes!” I said.

I sauntered over to the mantelpiece, over which was a mirror. I was gazing at myself and thinking that it was not such a bad sort of face⁠—not handsome, perhaps, but with a sort of something about it⁠—when of a sudden the mirror reflected something else.

That something was the figure of that popular novelist and well-known after-dinner speaker, Miss Julia Ukridge. “Good morning,” she said.

It is curious how often the gods who make sport of us poor humans defeat their own ends by overdoing the thing. Any contretemps less awful than this, however slightly less awful, would undoubtedly have left me as limp as a sheet of carbon paper, rattled and stammering, in prime condition to be made sport of. But as it was I found myself strangely cool. I had a subconscious feeling that there would be a reaction later, and that the next time I looked in a mirror I should find my hair strangely whitened, but for the moment I was unnaturally composed, and my brain buzzed like a circular-saw in an icebox.

“How do you do?” I heard myself say. My voice seemed to come from a long distance, but it was steady and even pleasing in timbre.

“You wished to see me, Mr. Corcoran?”

“Yes.”

“Then why,” enquired Miss Ukridge, softly, “did you ask for my secretary?”

There was that same acid sub-tinkle in her voice which had been there at our previous battle in the same ring. But that odd alertness stood by me well.

“I understood that you were out of town,” I said.

“Who told you that?”

“They were saying so at the Savage Club the other night.” This seemed to hold her.

“Why did you wish to see me?” she asked, baffled by my ready intelligence.

“I hoped to get a few facts concerning your proposed lecture tour in America.”

“How did you know that I was about to lecture in America?” I raised my eyebrows. This was childish.

“They were saying so at the Savage Club,” I replied. Baffled again.

“I had an idea, Mr. Corcoran,” she said, with a nasty gleam in her blue eyes, “that you might be the person alluded to in my nephew Stanley’s telegram.”

“Telegram?”

“Yes. I altered my plans and returned to London last night instead of waiting till this evening, and I had scarcely arrived when a telegram came, signed Ukridge, from the village where I had been staying. It instructed my secretary to hand over to a gentleman who would call this morning the draft of the speech which I