Ukridge

CHAPTER I. UKRIDGE'S DOG COLLEGE-1

CHAPTER I. UKRIDGE'S DOG COLLEGE

“ Laddie,” said Stanley Featherstonehaugh Ukridge, that much-enduring man, helping himself to my tobacco and slipping the pouch absently into his pocket, “listen to me, you son of Belial.”

“ What?” I said, retrieving the pouch.

“ Do you want to make an enormous fortune?”

“ I do.”

“ Then write my biography. Bung it down on paper, and we’ll split the proceeds. I’ve been making a pretty close study of your stuff lately, old horse, and it’s all wrong. The trouble with you is that you don’t plumb the well-springs of human nature and all that. You just think up some rotten yarn about some-dam-thing-or-other and shove it down. Now, if you tackled my life, you’d have something worth writing about. Pots of money in it, my boy—English serial rights and American serial rights and book rights, and dramatic rights and movie rights—well, you can take it from me that, at a conservative estimate, we should clean up at least fifty thousand pounds apiece.”

“ As much as that?”

“ Fully that. And listen, laddie, I’ll tell you what. You’re a good chap and we’ve been pals for years, so I’ll let you have my share of the English serial rights for a hundred pounds down.”

“ What makes you think I’ve got a hundred pounds?”

“ Well, then, I’ll make it my share of the English and American serial rights for fifty.”

“ Your collar’s come off its stud.”

“ How about my complete share of the whole dashed outfit for twenty-five?”

“ Not for me, thanks.”

“ Then I’ll tell you what, old horse,” said Ukridge, inspired. “Just lend me half a crown to be going on with.”

If the leading incidents of S. F. Ukridge’s disreputable career are to be given to the public—and not, as some might suggest, decently hushed up—I suppose I am the man to write them. Ukridge and I have been intimate since the days of school. Together we sported on the green, and when he was expelled no one missed him more than I. An unfortunate business, this expulsion. Ukridge’s generous spirit, ever ill-attuned to school rules, caused him eventually to break the solemnest of them all by sneaking out at night to try his skill at the coco-nut-shies of the local village fair; and his foresight in putting on scarlet whiskers and a false nose for the expedition was completely neutralised by the fact that he absent-mindedly wore his school cap throughout the entire proceedings. He left the next morning, regretted by all.

After this there was a hiatus of some years in our friendship. I was at Cambridge, absorbing culture, and Ukridge, as far as I could gather from his rare letters and the reports of mutual acquaintances, flitting about the world like a snipe. Somebody met him in New York, just off a cattle-ship. Somebody else saw him in Buenos Ayres. Somebody, again, spoke sadly of having been pounced on by him at Monte Carlo and touched for a fiver. It was not until I settled down in London that he came back into my life. We met in Piccadilly one day, and resumed our relations where they had been broken off. Old associations are strong, and the fact that he was about my build and so could wear my socks and shirts drew us very close together.

Then he disappeared again, and it was a month or more before I got news of him.

It was George Tupper who brought the news. George was head of the school in my last year, and he has fulfilled exactly the impeccable promise of those early days. He is in the Foreign Office, doing well and much respected. He has an earnest, pulpy heart and takes other people’s troubles very seriously. Often he had mourned to me like a father over Ukridge’s erratic progress through life, and now, as he spoke, he seemed to be filled with a solemn joy, as over a reformed prodigal.

“ Have you heard about Ukridge?” said George Tupper. “He has settled down at last. Gone to live with an aunt of his who owns one of those big houses on Wimbledon Common. A very rich woman. I am delighted. It will be the making of the old chap.”

I suppose he was right in a way, but to me this tame subsidence into companionship with a rich aunt in Wimbledon seemed somehow an indecent, almost a tragic, end to a colourful career like that of S. F. Ukridge. And when I met the man a week later my heart grew heavier still.

It was in Oxford Street at the hour when women come up from the suburbs to shop; and he was standing among the dogs and commissionaires outside Selfridge’s. His arms were full of parcels, his face was set in a mask of wan discomfort, and he was so beautifully dressed that for an instant I did not recognise him. Everything which the Correct Man wears was assembled on his person, from the silk hat to the patent-leather boots; and, as he confided to me in the first minute, he was suffering the tortures of the damned. The boots pinched him, the hat hurt his forehead, and the collar was worse than the hat and boots combined.

“ She makes me wear them,” he said, moodily, jerking his head towards the interior of the store and uttering a sharp howl as the movement caused the collar to gouge his neck.

“ Still,” I said, trying to turn his mind to happier things, “you must be having a great time. George Tupper tells me that your aunt is rich. I suppose you’re living off the fat of the land.”

“ The browsing and sluicing are good,” admitted Ukridge. “But it’s a wearing life, laddie. A wearing life, old horse.”

“ Why don’t you come and see me sometimes?”

“ I’m not allowed out at night.”

“ Well, shall I come and see you?”

A look of poignant alarm shot out from under the silk hat.

“ Don’t dream of it, laddie,” said Ukridge, earnestly. “Don’t dream of it. You’re a good chap—my best pal and all that sort of thing—but the fact is, my standing in the home’s none too solid even now, and one sight of you would knock my prestige into hash. Aunt Julia would think you worldly.”

“ I’m not worldly.”

“ Well, you look worldly. You wear a squash hat and a soft collar. If you don’t mind my suggesting it, old horse, I think, if I were you, I’d pop off now before she comes out. Good-bye, laddie.”

“ Ichabod!” I murmured sadly to myself as I passed on down Oxford Street. “Ichabod!”

I should have had more faith. I should have known my Ukridge better. I should have realised that a London suburb could no more imprison that great man permanently than Elba did Napoleon.

One afternoon, as I let myself into the house in Ebury Street of which I rented at that time the bedroom and sitting-room on the first floor, I came upon Bowles, my landlord, standing in listening attitude at the foot of the stairs.

“ Good afternoon, sir,” said Bowles. “A gentleman is waiting to see you. I fancy I heard him calling me a moment ago.”

“ Who is he?”

“ A Mr. Ukridge, sir. He——”

A vast voice boomed out from above.

“ Bowles, old horse!”

Bowles, like all other proprietors of furnished apartments in the south-western district of London, was an ex-butler, and about him, as about all ex-butlers, there clung like a garment an aura of dignified superiority which had never failed to crush my spirit. He was a man of portly aspect, with a bald head and prominent eyes of a lightish green—eyes that seemed to weigh me dispassionately and find me wanting. “H’m!” they seemed to say. “Young—very young. And not at all what I have been accustomed to in the best places.” To hear this dignitary addressed—and in a shout at that—as “old horse” affected me with much the same sense of imminent chaos as would afflict a devout young curate if he saw his bishop slapped on the back. The shock, therefore, when he responded not merely mildly but with what almost amounted to camaraderie was numbing.

“ Sir?” cooed Bowles.

“ Bring me six bones and a corkscrew.”

“ Very good, sir.”

Bowles retired, and I bounded upstairs and flung open the door of my sitting-room.

“ Great Scott!” I said, blankly.

The place was a sea of Pekingese dogs. Later investigation reduced their numbers to six, but in that first moment there seemed to be hundreds. Goggling eyes met mine wherever I looked. The room was a forest of waving tails. With his back against the mantelpiece, smoking placidly, stood Ukridge.

“ Hallo, laddie!” he said, with a genial wave of the hand, as if to make me free of the place. “You’re just in time. I’ve got to dash off and catch a train in a quarter of an hour. Stop it, you mutts!” he bellowed, and the six Pekingese, who had been barking steadily since my arrival, stopped in mid-yap, and were still. Ukridge’s personality seemed to exercise a magnetism over the animal kingdom, from ex-butlers to Pekes, which bordered on the uncanny. “I’m off to Sheep’s Cray, in Kent. Taken a cottage there.”

“ Are you going to live there?”

“ Yes.”

“ But what about your aunt?”

“ Oh, I’ve left her. Life is stern and life is earnest, and if I mean to make a fortune I’ve got to bustle about and not stay cooped up in a place like Wimbledon.”

“ Something in that.”

“ Besides which, she told me the very sight of me made her sick and she never wanted to see me again.”

I might have guessed, directly I saw him, that some upheaval had taken place. The sumptuous raiment which had made him such a treat to the eye at our last meeting was gone, and he was back in his pre-Wimbledon costume, which was, as the advertisements say, distinctively individual. Over grey flannel trousers, a golf coat, and a brown sweater he wore like a royal robe a bright yellow mackintosh. His collar had broken free from its stud and showed a couple of inches of bare neck. His hair was disordered, and his masterful nose was topped by a pair of steel-rimmed pince-nez cunningly attached to his flapping ears with ginger-beer wire. His whole appearance spelled revolt.

Bowles manifested himself with a plateful of bones.

“ That’s right. Chuck ’em down on the floor.”

“ Very good, sir.”

“ I like that fellow,” said Ukridge, as the door closed. “We had a dashed interesting talk before you came in. Did you know he had a cousin on the music-halls?”

“ He hasn’t confided in me much.”

“ He’s promised me an introduction to him later on. May be useful to be in touch with a man who knows the ropes. You see, laddie, I’ve hit on the most amazing scheme.” He swept his arm round dramatically, overturning a plaster cast of the Infant Samuel at Prayer. “All right, all right, you can mend it with glue or something, and, anyway, you’re probably better without it. Yessir, I’ve hit on a great scheme. The idea of a thousand years.”

“ What’s that?”

“ I’m going to train dogs.”

“ Train dogs?”

“ For the music-hall stage. Dog acts, you know. Performing dogs. Pots of money in it. I start in a modest way with these six. When I’ve taught ’em a few tricks, I sell them to a fellow in the profession for a large sum and buy twelve more. I train those, sell ’em for a large sum, and with the money buy twenty-four more. I train those——”

“ Here, wait a minute.” My head was beginning to swim. I had a vision of England paved with Pekingese dogs, all doing tricks. “How do you know you’ll be able to sell them?”

“ Of course I shall. The demand’s enormous. Supply can’t cope with it. At a conservative estimate I should think I ought to scoop in four or five thousand pounds the first year. That, of course, is before the business really starts to expand.”

“ I see.”

“ When I get going properly, with a dozen assistants under me and an organised establishment, I shall begin to touch the big money. What I’m aiming at is a sort of Dogs’ College out in the country somewhere. Big place with a lot of ground. Regular classes and a set curriculum. Large staff, each member of it with so many dogs under his care, me looking on and superintending. Why, once the thing starts moving it’ll run itself, and all I shall have to do will be to sit back and endorse the cheques. It isn’t as if I would have to confine my operations to England. The demand for performing dogs is universal throughout the civilised world. America wants performing dogs. Australia wants performing dogs. Africa could do with a few, I’ve no doubt. My aim, laddie, is gradually to get a monopoly of the trade. I want everybody who needs a performing dog of any description to come automatically to me. And I’ll tell you what, laddie. If you like to put up a bit of capital, I’ll let you in on the ground floor.”