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

Miss Julia Ukridge, the novelist. I have been an admirer of hers for many years. But, with Leonard in this terrible state, naturally I could not stir from the house. His claims were paramount. I shall have to wait till Miss Ukridge returns from America.”

“Next April,” murmured Ukridge, softly.

“I think, if you will excuse me now, Mr. Corcoran, I will just run up and see how Leonard is.”

The door closed.

“Laddie,” said Ukridge, solemnly, “doesn’t this just show⁠—”

I gazed at him accusingly.

“Did you poison that parrot?”

“Me? Poison the parrot? Of course I didn’t poison the parrot. The whole thing was due to an act of mistaken kindness carried out in a spirit of the purest altruism. And, as I was saying, doesn’t it just show that no little act of kindness, however trivial, is ever wasted in the great scheme of things? One might have supposed that when I brought the old lady that bottle of Peppo the thing would have begun and ended there with a few conventional words of thanks. But mark, laddie, how all things work together for good. Millie, who, between ourselves, is absolutely a girl in a million, happened to think the bird was looking a bit off colour last night, and with a kindly anxiety to do him a bit of good, gave him a slice of bread soaked in Peppo. Thought it might brace him up. Now, what they put in that stuff, old man, I don’t know, but the fact remains that the bird almost instantly became perfectly pie-eyed. You have heard the old lady’s account of the affair, but, believe me, she doesn’t know one half of it. Millie informs me that Leonard’s behaviour had to be seen to be believed. When the old lady came down he was practically in a drunken stupor, and all today he has been suffering from a shocking head. If he’s really sitting up and taking notice again, it simply means that he has worked off one of the finest hangovers of the age. Let this be a lesson to you, laddie, never to let a day go by without its act of kindness. What’s the time, old horse?”

“Getting on for five.”

Ukridge seemed to muse for a moment, and a happy smile irradiated his face.

“About now,” he said, complacently, “my aunt is out in the Channel somewhere. And I see by the morning paper that there is a nasty gale blowing up from the southeast!”

A Bit of Luck for Mabel

“Life, laddie,” said Ukridge, “is very rum.”

He had been lying for some time silent on the sofa, his face toward the ceiling; and I had supposed that he was asleep. But now it appeared that it was thought, not slumber that had caused his unwonted quietude.

“Very, very rum,” said Ukridge.

He heaved himself up and stared out of the window. The sitting-room window of the cottage which I had taken in the country looked upon a stretch of lawn, backed by a little spinney; and now there stole in through it from the waking world outside that first cool breeze which heralds the dawning of a summer day.

“Great Scott!” I said, looking at my watch. “Do you realize you’ve kept me up talking all night?”

Ukridge did not answer. There was a curious, faraway look on his face, and he uttered a sound like the last gurgle of an expiring soda-water siphon, which I took to be his idea of a sigh. I saw what had happened. There is a certain hour at the day’s beginning which brings with it a strange magic, tapping wells of sentiment in the most hard-boiled. In this hour, with the sun pinking the eastern sky and the early bird chirping over its worm, Stanley Featherstonehaugh Ukridge, that battered man of wrath, had become maudlin; and, instead of being allowed to go to bed, I was in for some story of his murky past.

“Extraordinarily rum,” said Ukridge. “So is Fate. It’s curious to think, Corky, old horse, that if things had not happened as they did I might now be a man of tremendous importance, looked up to and respected by all in Singapore.”

“Why should anyone respect you in Singapore?”

“Rolling in money,” proceeded Ukridge wistfully.

“You?”

“Yes, me. Did you ever hear of one of those blokes out East who didn’t amass a huge fortune? Of course you didn’t. Well, think what I should have done, with my brain and vision. Mabel’s father made a perfect pot of money in Singapore and I don’t suppose he had any vision whatsoever.”

“Who was Mabel?”

“Haven’t I ever spoken to you of Mabel?”

“No. Mabel who?”

“I won’t mention names.”

“I hate stories without names.”

“You’ll have this story without names⁠—and like it,” said Ukridge with spirit. He sighed again. A most unpleasant sound. “Corky, my boy,” he said, “do you realize on what slender threads our lives hang? Do you realize how trifling can be the snags on which we stub our toes as we go through this world? Do you realize⁠—”

“Get on with it.”

“In my case it was a top hat.”

“What was a top hat?”

“The snag.”

“You stubbed your toe on a top hat?”

“Figuratively, yes. It was a top hat which altered the whole course of my life.”

“You never had a top hat.”

“Yes, I did have a top hat. It’s absurd for you to pretend that I never had a top hat. You know perfectly well that when I go to live with my Aunt Julia in Wimbledon I roll in top hats⁠—literally roll.”

“Oh, yes, when you go to live with your aunt.”

“Well, it was when I was living with her that I met Mabel. The affair of the top hat happened⁠—”

I looked at my watch again.

“I can give you half an hour,” I said. “After that I’m going to bed. If you can condense Mabel into a thirty-minute sketch, carry on.”

“This is not quite the sympathetic attitude I would like to see in an old friend, Corky.”

“It’s the only attitude I’m capable of at half past three in