Ukridge Stories, P. G. Wodehouse [books suggested by bill gates txt] 📗

wild, his pince-nez at an angle of forty-five, and his collar separated from its stud by a gap of several inches. His whole appearance clearly indicated some blow of fate, and I was not surprised when his first words revealed an aching heart.

“Hank Philbrick,” said Ukridge without preamble, “is a son of Belial, a leper, and a worm.”

“What’s happened now?”

“He’s let me down, the weak-minded Tishbite! Doesn’t want that house in the country after all. My gosh, if Hank Philbrick is the sort of man Canada is producing nowadays, Heaven help the British Empire.”

I shelved my petty troubles. They seemed insignificant beside this majestic tragedy.

“What made him change his mind?” I asked.

“The wobbling, vacillating hellhound! I always had a feeling that there was something wrong with that man. He had a nasty, shifty eye. You’ll bear me out, laddie, in that? Haven’t I spoken to you a hundred times about his shifty eye?”

“Certainly. Why did he change his mind?”

“Didn’t I always say he wasn’t to be trusted?”

“Repeatedly. What made him change his mind?”

Ukridge laughed with a sharp bitterness that nearly cracked the windowpane. His collar leaped like a live thing. Ukridge’s collar was always a sort of thermometer that registered the warmth of his feelings. Sometimes, when his temperature was normal, it would remain attached to its stud for minutes at a time; but the slightest touch of fever sent it jumping up, and the more he was moved the higher it jumped.

“When I knew Hank out in Canada,” he said, “he had the constitution of an ox. Ostriches took his correspondence course in digestion. But directly he comes into a bit of money⁠—Laddie,” said Ukridge earnestly, “when I’m a rich man, I want you to stand at my elbow and watch me very carefully. The moment you see signs of degeneration speak a warning word. Don’t let me coddle myself. Don’t let me get fussy about my health. Where was I? Oh yes. Directly this man comes into a bit of money he gets the idea that he’s a sort of fragile, delicate flower.”

“I shouldn’t have thought so from what you were telling me the other night.”

“What happened the other night was the cause of all the trouble. Naturally he woke up with a bit of a head.”

“I can quite believe it.”

“Yes, but my gosh, what’s a head! In the old days he would have gone and worked it oft by taking a dose of painkiller and chopping down half-a-dozen trees. But now what happens? Having all this money, he wouldn’t take a simple remedy like that. No, sir! He went to one of those Harley Street sharks who charge a couple of guineas for saying ‘Well, how are we this morning?’ A fatal move, laddie. Naturally, the shark was all over him. Tapped him here and prodded him there, said he was run down, and finally told him he ought to spend six months in a dry, sunny climate. Recommended Egypt. Egypt, I’ll trouble you, for a bloke who lived fifty years thinking that it was a town in Illinois. Well, the long and the short of it is that he’s gone off for six months, doesn’t want a place in England, and I hope he gets bitten by a crocodile. And the lease all drawn out and ready to sign. Upon my Sam, it’s a little hard. Sometimes I wonder whether it’s worth while going on struggling.”

A sombre silence fell upon us. Ukridge, sunk in gloomy reverie, fumbled absently at his collar stud. I smoked with a heavy heart.

“What will your friend Dora do now?” I said at length.

“That’s what’s worrying me,” said Ukridge, lugubriously. “I’ve been trying to think of some other way of raising that hundred, but at the moment I don’t mind confessing I am baffled. I can see no daylight.”

Nor could I. His chance of raising a hundred pounds by any means short of breaking into the Mint seemed slight indeed.

“Odd the way things happen,” I said. I gave him the editor’s letter. “Look at that.”

“What’s this?”

“He’s sending me to do an article on the Pen and Ink Club dance. If only I had never been to see your aunt⁠—”

“And made such a mess of it.”

“I didn’t make a mess of it. It just happened that⁠—”

“All right, laddie, all right,” said Ukridge, tonelessly. “Don’t let’s split straws. The fact remains, whether it’s your fault or not, the thing was a complete frost. What were you saying?”

“I was saying that, if only I had never been to your aunt, I could have met her in a perfectly natural way at this dance.”

“Done Young Disciple stuff,” said Ukridge, seizing on the idea. “Rubbed in the fact that you could do her a bit of good by boosting her in the paper.”

“And asked her to re-engage Miss Mason as her secretary.”

Ukridge fiddled with the letter.

“You don’t think even now⁠—”

I was sorry for him and sorrier for Dora Mason, but on this point I was firm.

“No, I don’t.”

“But consider, laddie,” urged Ukridge. “At this dance she may well be in malleable mood. The lights, the music, the laughter, the jollity.”

“No,” I said. “It can’t be done. I can’t back out of going to the affair, because if I did I’d never get any more work to do for this paper. But I’ll tell you one thing. I mean to keep quite clear of your aunt. That’s final. I dream of her in the night sometimes and wake up screaming. And in any case it wouldn’t be any use my tackling her. She wouldn’t listen to me. It’s too late. You weren’t there that afternoon at Wimbledon, but you can take it from me that I’m not one of her circle of friends.”

“That’s the way it always happens,” sighed Ukridge. “Everything comes too late. Well, I’ll be popping off. Lot of heavy thinking to do, laddie. Lot of heavy thinking.”

And he left without borrowing even a cigar, a sure sign that his resilient spirit was crushed beyond recuperation.

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