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

The thing seemed to me to have the makings of one of those great historic mysteries you read about. I saw no reason why posterity should not discuss forever the problem of the bloke in the gray topper as keenly as they do the man in the iron mask. “The facts,” I said, “are precisely as I have stated. At nine-thirty this morning a bird, gayly appareled in morning coat, sponge-bag trousers and gray top hat presented himself at my rooms and⁠—”

At this moment a voice spoke behind me.

“Oh, hullo!”

I turned, and observed the Bart.

“Hullo!” I said.

I introduced Tuppy. The Bart nodded courteously.

“I say,” said the Bart. “Where’s the old man?”

“What old man?”

“Mabel’s father. Didn’t he catch you?”

I stared at the man. He appeared to me to be gibbering. And a gibbering Bart is a nasty thing to have hanging about you before you have strengthened yourself with a bit of lunch.

“Mabel’s father’s in Singapore,” I said.

“No, he isn’t,” said the Bart. “He got home yesterday, and Mabel sent him round to your place to pick you up and bring you down here in the car. Had you left before he arrived?”

Well, that’s where the story ends, Corky. From the moment that pimply baronet uttered those words, you might say that I faded out of the picture. I never went near Onslow Square again. Nobody can say that I lack nerve, but I hadn’t nerve enough to creep into the family circle and resume acquaintance with that fearsome bloke. There are some men, no doubt, with whom I might have been able to pass the whole thing off with a light laugh, but that glimpse I had had of him as he bellowed out of the window told me that he was not one of them. I faded away, Corky, old horse, just faded away. And about a couple of months later I read in the paper that Mabel had married the Bart.

Ukridge sighed another sigh and heaved himself up from the sofa. Outside, the world was blue-gray with the growing dawn, and even the later birds were busy among the worms.

“You might make a story out of that, Corky,” said Ukridge.

“I might,” I said.

“All profits to be shared on a strict fifty-fifty basis, of course.”

“Of course.”

Ukridge brooded.

“Though it really wants a bigger man to do it justice and tell it properly, bringing out all the fine shades of the tragedy. It wants somebody like Thomas Hardy or Kipling or somebody.”

“Better let me have a shot at it.”

“All right,” said Ukridge. “And, as regards a title, I should call it ‘His Lost Romance’ or something like that. Or would you suggest simply something terse and telling like ‘Fate’ or ‘Destiny’?”

“I’ll think of a title,” I said.

“Laddie,” said Ukridge, “I need capital, old horse⁠—need it sorely.”

He removed his glistening silk hat, looked at it in a puzzled way, and replaced it on his head. We had met by chance near the eastern end of Piccadilly, and the breathtaking gorgeousness of his costume told me that, since I had seen him last, there must have occurred between him and his aunt Julia one of those periodical reconciliations which were wont to punctuate his hectic and disreputable career. For those who know Stanley Featherstonehaugh Ukridge, that much-enduring man, are aware that he is the nephew of Miss Julia Ukridge, the wealthy and popular novelist, and that from time to time, when she can bring herself to forgive and let bygones be bygones, he goes to dwell for awhile in gilded servitude at her house in Wimbledon.

“Yes, Corky, my boy, I want a bit of capital.”

“Oh?”

“And want it quick. The truest saying in this world is that you can’t accumulate if you don’t speculate. But how the deuce are you to start speculating unless you accumulate a few quid to begin with?”

“Ah,” I said, non-committally.

“Take my case,” proceeded Ukridge, running a large, beautifully gloved finger round the inside of a spotless collar which appeared to fit a trifle too snugly to the neck. “I have an absolutely safe double for Kempton Park on the fifteenth, and even a modest investment would bring me in several hundred pounds. But bookies, blast them, require cash down in advance, so where am I? Without capital, enterprise is strangled at birth.”

“Can’t you get some from your aunt?”

“Not a cent. She is one of those women who simply do not disgorge. All her surplus cash is devoted to adding to her collection of mouldy snuffboxes. When I look at those snuffboxes and reflect that any single one of them, judiciously put up the spout, would set my feet on the road to Fortune, only my innate sense of honesty keeps me from pinching them.”

“You mean they’re locked up?”

“It’s hard, laddie. Very hard and bitter and ironical. She buys me suits. She buys me hats. She buys me boots. She buys me spats. And, what is more, insists on my wearing the damned things. With what result? Not only am I infernally uncomfortable, but my exterior creates a totally false impression in the minds of any blokes I meet to whom I may happen to owe a bit of money. When I go about looking as if I owned the Mint, it becomes difficult to convince them that I am not in a position to pay them their beastly one pound fourteen and eleven, or whatever it is. I tell you, laddie, the strain has begun to weigh upon me to such an extent that the breaking-point may arrive at any moment. Every day it is becoming more imperative that I clear out and start life again upon my own. But this cannot be done without cash. And that is why I look around me and say to myself: ‘How am I to acquire a bit of capital?’ ”

I thought it best to observe at this point that my own circumstances were extremely straitened. Ukridge received the information with a