Love Among the Chickens, P. G. Wodehouse [top non fiction books of all time .TXT] 📗

Stanley!” said Mrs. Ukridge plaintively. “He’s not. He’s such a dear, Mr. Garnet. A beautiful, purebred Persian. He has taken prizes.”

“He’s always taking something. That’s why he didn’t come down with us.”

“A great, horrid, beast of a dog bit him, Mr. Garnet.” Mrs. Ukridge’s eyes became round and shone. “And poor Edwin had to go to a cats’ hospital.”

“And I hope,” said Ukridge, “the experience will do him good. Sneaked a dog’s dinner, Garnet, under his very nose, if you please. Naturally the dog lodged a protest.”

“I’m so afraid that he will be frightened of Bob. He will be very timid, and Bob’s so boisterous. Isn’t he, Mr. Garnet?”

“That’s all right,” said Ukridge. “Bob won’t hurt him, unless he tries to steal his dinner. In that case we will have Edwin made into a rug.”

“Stanley doesn’t like Edwin,” said Mrs. Ukridge, sadly.

Edwin arrived early in the afternoon, and was shut into the kitchen. He struck me as a handsome cat, but nervous.

The Derricks followed two hours later. Mr. Chase was not of the party.

“Tom had to go to London,” explained the professor, “or he would have been delighted to come. It was a disappointment to the boy, for he wanted to see the farm.”

“He must come some other time,” said Ukridge. “We invite inspection. Look here,” he broke off suddenly⁠—we were nearing the fowl-run now, Mrs. Ukridge walking in front with Phyllis Derrick⁠—“were you ever at Bristol?”

“Never, sir,” said the professor.

“Because I knew just such another fat little buffer there a few years ago. Gay old bird, he was. He⁠—”

“This is the fowl-run, professor,” I broke in, with a moist, tingling feeling across my forehead and up my spine. I saw the professor stiffen as he walked, while his face deepened in colour. Ukridge’s breezy way of expressing himself is apt to electrify the stranger.

“You will notice the able way⁠—ha! ha!⁠—in which the wire-netting is arranged,” I continued feverishly. “Took some doing, that. By Jove, yes. It was hot work. Nice lot of fowls, aren’t they? Rather a mixed lot of course. Ha! ha! That’s the dealer’s fault though. We are getting quite a number of eggs now. Hens wouldn’t lay at first. Couldn’t make them.”

I babbled on, till from the corner of my eye I saw the flush fade from the professor’s face and his back gradually relax its poker-like attitude. The situation was saved for the moment, but there was no knowing what further excesses Ukridge might indulge in. I managed to draw him aside as we went through the fowl-run, and expostulated.

“For goodness sake be careful,” I whispered. “You’ve no notion how touchy he is.”

“But I said nothing,” he replied, amazed.

“Hang it, you know, nobody likes to be called a fat little buffer to his face.”

“What! My dear old man, nobody minds a little thing like that. We can’t be stilted and formal. It’s ever so much more friendly to relax and be chummy.”

Here we rejoined the others, and I was left with a leaden foreboding of gruesome things in store. I knew what manner of man Ukridge was when he relaxed and became chummy. Friendships of years’ standing had failed to survive the test.

For the time being, however, all went well. In his role of lecturer he offended no one, and Phyllis and her father behaved admirably. They received his strangest theories without a twitch of the mouth.

“Ah,” the professor would say, “now is that really so? Very interesting indeed.”

Only once, when Ukridge was describing some more than usually original device for the furthering of the interests of his fowls, did a slight spasm disturb Phyllis’s look of attentive reverence.

“And you have really had no previous experience in chicken-farming?” she said.

“None,” said Ukridge, beaming through his glasses. “Not an atom. But I can turn my hand to anything, you know. Things seem to come naturally to me somehow.”

“I see,” said Phyllis.

It was while matters were progressing with this beautiful smoothness that I observed the square form of the Hired Retainer approaching us. Somehow⁠—I cannot say why⁠—I had a feeling that he came with bad news. Perhaps it was his air of quiet satisfaction which struck me as ominous.

“Beg pardon, Mr. Ukridge, sir.”

Ukridge was in the middle of a very eloquent excursus on the feeding of fowls, a subject on which he held views of his own as ingenious as they were novel. The interruption annoyed him.

“Well, Beale,” he said, “what is it?”

“That there cat, sir, what came today.”

“Oh, Beale,” cried Mrs. Ukridge in agitation, “what has happened?”

“Having something to say to the missis⁠—”

“What has happened? Oh, Beale, don’t say that Edwin has been hurt? Where is he? Oh, poor Edwin!”

“Having something to say to the missis⁠—”

“If Bob has bitten him I hope he had his nose well scratched,” said Mrs. Ukridge vindictively.

“Having something to say to the missis,” resumed the Hired Retainer tranquilly, “I went into the kitchen ten minutes back. The cat was sitting on the mat.”

Beale’s narrative style closely resembled that of a certain book I had read in my infancy. I wish I could remember its title. It was a well-written book.

“Yes, Beale, yes?” said Mrs. Ukridge. “Oh, do go on.”

“ ‘Hullo, puss,’ I says to him, ‘and ’ow are you, sir?’ ‘Be careful,’ says the missis. ‘ ’E’s that timid,’ she says, ‘you wouldn’t believe,’ she says. ‘ ’E’s only just settled down, as you may say,’ she says. ‘Ho, don’t you fret,’ I says to her, ‘ ’im and me understands each other. ’Im and me,’ I says, ‘is old friends. ’E’s my dear old pal, Corporal Banks.’ She grinned at that, ma’am, Corporal Banks being a man we’d ’ad many a ’earty laugh at in the old days. ’E was, in a manner of speaking, a joke between us.”

“Oh, do⁠—go⁠—on, Beale. What has happened to Edwin?”

The Hired Retainer proceeded in calm, even tones.

“We was talking there, ma’am, when Bob, what had followed me unknown, trotted in. When the cat ketched sight of ’im sniffing about, there was such a spitting and swearing as you never ’eard; and blowed,” said Mr. Beale amusedly, “blowed if the old cat