Ukridge

CHAPTER I. UKRIDGE'S DOG COLLEGE-3

“ Why?”

“ I want to scatter ’em about on the table in front of this Nickerson blighter.”

“ Is this where he lives?”

We had come to a red-roofed house, set back from the road amidst trees. Ukridge wielded the knocker forcefully.

“ Tell Mr. Nickerson,” he said to the maid, “that Mr. Ukridge has called and would like a word.”

About the demeanour of the man who presently entered the room into which we had been shown there was that subtle but well-marked something which stamps your creditor all the world over. Mr. Nickerson was a man of medium height, almost completely surrounded by whiskers, and through the shrubbery he gazed at Ukridge with frozen eyes, shooting out waves of deleterious animal magnetism. You could see at a glance that he was not fond of Ukridge. Take him for all in all, Mr. Nickerson looked like one of the less amiable prophets of the Old Testament about to interview the captive monarch of the Amalekites.

“ Well?” he said, and I have never heard the word spoken in a more forbidding manner.

“ I’ve come about the rent.”

“ Ah!” said Mr. Nickerson, guardedly.

“ To pay it,” said Ukridge.

“ To pay it!” ejaculated Mr. Nickerson, incredulously.

“ Here!” said Ukridge, and with a superb gesture flung money on the table.

I understood now why the massive-minded man had wanted small notes. They made a brave display. There was a light breeze blowing in through the open window, and so musical a rustling did it set up as it played about the heaped-up wealth that Mr. Nickerson’s austerity seemed to vanish like breath off a razor-blade. For a moment a dazed look came into his eyes and he swayed slightly; then, as he started to gather up the money, he took on the benevolent air of a bishop blessing pilgrims. As far as Mr. Nickerson was concerned, the sun was up.

“ Why, thank you, Mr. Ukridge, I’m sure,” he said. “Thank you very much. No hard feelings, I trust?”

“ Not on my side, old horse,” responded Ukridge, affably. “Business is business.”

“ Exactly.”

“ Well, I may as well take those dogs now,” said Ukridge, helping himself to a cigar from a box which he had just discovered on the mantelpiece and putting a couple more in his pocket in the friendliest way. “The sooner they’re back with me, the better. They’ve lost a day’s education as it is.”

“ Why, certainly, Mr. Ukridge; certainly. They are in the shed at the bottom of the garden. I will get them for you at once.”

He retreated through the door, babbling ingratiatingly.

“ Amazing how fond these blokes are of money,” sighed Ukridge. “It’s a thing I don’t like to see. Sordid, I call it. That blighter’s eyes were gleaming, positively gleaming, laddie, as he scooped up the stuff. Good cigars these,” he added, pocketing three more.

There was a faltering footstep outside, and Mr. Nickerson re-entered the room. The man appeared to have something on his mind. A glassy look was in his whisker-bordered eyes, and his mouth, though it was not easy to see it through the jungle, seemed to me to be sagging mournfully. He resembled a minor prophet who has been hit behind the ear with a stuffed eel-skin.

“ Mr. Ukridge!”

“ Hallo?”

“ The—the little dogs!”

“ Well?”

“ The little dogs!”

“ What about them?”

“ They have gone!”

“ Gone?”

“ Run away!”

“ Run away? How the devil could they run away?”

“ There seems to have been a loose board at the back of the shed. The little dogs must have wriggled through. There is no trace of them to be found.”

Ukridge flung up his arms despairingly. He swelled like a captive balloon. His pince-nez rocked on his nose, his mackintosh flapped menacingly, and his collar sprang off its stud. He brought his fist down with a crash on the table.

“ Upon my Sam!”

“ I am extremely sorry——”

“ Upon my Sam!” cried Ukridge. “It’s hard. It’s pretty hard. I come down here to inaugurate a great business, which would eventually have brought trade and prosperity to the whole neighbourhood, and I have hardly had time to turn round and attend to the preliminary details of the enterprise when this man comes and sneaks my dogs. And now he tells me with a light laugh——”

“ Mr. Ukridge, I assure you——”

“ Tells me with a light laugh that they’ve gone. Gone! Gone where? Why, dash it, they may be all over the county. A fat chance I’ve got of ever seeing them again. Six valuable Pekingese, already educated practically to the stage where they could have been sold at an enormous profit——”

Mr. Nickerson was fumbling guiltily, and now he produced from his pocket a crumpled wad of notes, which he thrust agitatedly upon Ukridge, who waved them away with loathing.

“ This gentleman,” boomed Ukridge, indicating me with a sweeping gesture, “happens to be a lawyer. It is extremely lucky that he chanced to come down to-day to pay me a visit. Have you followed the proceedings closely?”

I said I had followed them very closely.

“ Is it your opinion that an action will lie?”

I said it seemed highly probable, and this expert ruling appeared to put the final touch on Mr. Nickerson’s collapse. Almost tearfully he urged the notes on Ukridge.

“ What’s this?” said Ukridge, loftily.

“ I—I thought, Mr. Ukridge, that, if it were agreeable to you, you might consent to take your money back, and—and consider the episode closed.”

Ukridge turned to me with raised eyebrows.

“ Ha!” he cried. “Ha, ha!”

“ Ha, ha!” I chorused, dutifully.

“ He thinks that he can close the episode by giving me my money back. Isn’t that rich?”

“ Fruity,” I agreed.

“ Those dogs were worth hundreds of pounds, and he thinks he can square me with a rotten twenty. Would you have believed it if you hadn’t heard it with your own ears, old horse?”

“ Never!”

“ I’ll tell you what I’ll do,” said Ukridge, after thought. “I’ll take this money.” Mr. Nickerson thanked him. “And there are one or two trifling accounts which want settling with some of the local tradesmen. You will square those——”

“ Certainly, Mr. Ukridge, certainly.”

“ And after that—well, I’ll have to think it over. If I decide to institute proceedings my lawyer will communicate with you in due course.”

And we left the wretched man, cowering despicably behind his whiskers.

It seemed to me, as we passed down the tree-shaded lane and out into the white glare of the road, that Ukridge was bearing himself in his hour of disaster with a rather admirable fortitude. His stock-in-trade, the life-blood of his enterprise, was scattered all over Kent, probably never to return, and all that he had to show on the other side of the balance-sheet was the cancelling of a few weeks’ back rent and the paying-off of Gooch, the grocer, and his friends. It was a situation which might well have crushed the spirit of an ordinary man, but Ukridge seemed by no means dejected. Jaunty, rather. His eyes shone behind their pince-nez and he whistled a rollicking air. When presently he began to sing, I felt that it was time to create a diversion.

“ What are you going to do?” I asked.

“ Who, me?” said Ukridge, buoyantly. “Oh, I’m coming back to town on the next train. You don’t mind hoofing it to the next station, do you? It’s only five miles. It might be a trifle risky to start from Sheep’s Cray.”

“ Why risky?”

“ Because of the dogs, of course.”

“ Dogs?”

Ukridge hummed a gay strain.

“ Oh, yes. I forgot to tell you about that. I’ve got ’em.”

“ What?”

“ Yes. I went out late last night and pinched them out of the shed.” He chuckled amusedly. “Perfectly simple. Only needed a clear, level head. I borrowed a dead cat and tied a string to it, legged it to old Nickerson’s garden after dark, dug a board out of the back of the shed, and shoved my head down and chirruped. The dogs came trickling out, and I hared off, towing old Colonel Cat on his string. Great run while it lasted, laddie. Hounds picked up the scent right away and started off in a bunch at fifty miles an hour. Cat and I doing a steady fifty-five. Thought every minute old Nickerson would hear and start blazing away with a g*n, but nothing happened. I led the pack across country for a run of twenty minutes without a check, parked the dogs in my sitting-room, and so to bed. Took it out of me, by gosh! Not so young as I was.”

I was silent for a moment, conscious of a feeling almost of reverence. This man was undoubtedly spacious. There had always been something about Ukridge that dulled the moral sense.

“ Well,” I said at length, “you’ve certainly got vision.”

“ Yes?” said Ukridge, gratified.

“ And the big, broad, flexible outlook.”

“ Got to, laddie, nowadays. The foundation of a successful business career.”

“ And what’s the next move?”

We were drawing near to the White Cottage. It stood and broiled in the sunlight, and I hoped that there might be something cool to drink inside it. The window of the sitting-room was open, and through it came the yapping of Pekingese.

“ Oh, I shall find another cottage somewhere else,” said Ukridge, eyeing his little home with a certain sentimentality. “That won’t be hard. Lots of cottages all over the place. And then I shall buckle down to serious work. You’ll be astounded at the progress I’ve made already. In a minute I’ll show you what those dogs can do.”

“ They can bark all right.”

“ Yes. They seem excited about something. You know, laddie, I’ve had a great idea. When I saw you at your rooms my scheme was to specialise in performing dogs for the music-halls—what you might call professional dogs. But I’ve been thinking it over, and now I don’t see why I shouldn’t go in for developing amateur talent as well. Say you have a dog—Fido, the household pet—and you think it would brighten the home if he could do a few tricks from time to time. Well, you’re a busy man, you haven’t the time to give up to teaching him. So you just tie a label to his collar and ship him off for a month to the Ukridge Dog College, and back he comes, thoroughly educated. No trouble, no worry, easy terms. Upon my Sam, I’m not sure there isn’t more money in the amateur branch than in the professional. I don’t see why eventually dog owners shouldn’t send their dogs to me as a regular thing, just as they send their sons to Eton and Winchester. My golly! this idea’s beginning to develop. I’ll tell you what—how would it be to issue special collars to all dogs which have graduated from my college? Something distinctive which everybody would recognise. See what I mean? Sort of badge of honour. Fellow with a dog entitled to wear the Ukridge collar would be in a position to look down on the bloke whose dog hadn’t got one. Gradually it would get so that anybody in a decent social position would be ashamed to be seen out with a non-Ukridge dog. The thing would become a landslide. Dogs would pour in from all corners of the country. More work than I could handle. Have to start branches. The scheme’s colossal. Millions in it, my boy! Millions!” He paused with his fingers on the handle of the front door. “Of course,” he went on, “just at present it’s no good blinking the fact that I’m hampered and handicapped by lack of funds and can only approach the thing on a small scale. What it amounts to, laddie, is that somehow or other I’ve got to get capital.”

It seemed the moment to spring the glad news.

“ I promised him I wouldn’t mention it,” I said, “for fear it might lead to disappointment, but as a matter of fact George Tupper is trying to raise some capital for you. I left him last night starting out to get it.”

“ George Tupper!”—Ukridge’s eyes dimmed with a not unmanly emotion—“George Tupper! By Gad, that fellow is the salt of the earth. Good, loyal fellow! A true friend. A man you can rely on. Upon my Sam, if there were more fellows about like old Tuppy, there wouldn’t be all this modern pessimism and unrest. Did he seem to have any idea where he could raise a bit of capital for me?”

“ Yes. He went round to tell your aunt about your coming down here to train those Pekes, and——What’s the matter?”

A fearful change had come over Ukridge’s jubilant front. His eyes bulged, his jaw sagged. With the addition of a few feet of grey whiskers he would have looked exactly like the recent Mr. Nickerson.

“ My aunt?” he mumbled, swaying on the door-handle.

“ Yes. What’s the matter? He thought, if he told her all about it, she might relent and rally round.”

The sigh of a gallant fighter at the end of his strength forced its way up from Ukridge’s mackintosh-covered bosom.

“ Of all the dashed, infernal, officious, meddling, muddling, fat-headed, interfering asses,” he said, wanly, “George Tupper is the worst.”

“ What do you mean?”

“ The man oughtn’t to be at large. He’s a public menace.”

“ But——”

“ Those dogs belong to my aunt. I pinched them when she chucked me out!”

Inside the cottage the Pekingese were still yapping industriously.

“ Upon my Sam,” said Ukridge, “it’s a little hard.”

I think he would have said more, but at this point a voice spoke with a sudden and awful abruptness from the interior of the cottage. It was a woman’s voice, a quiet, steely voice, a voice, it seemed to me, that suggested cold eyes, a beaky nose, and hair like g*n-metal.

“ Stanley!”

That was all it said, but it was enough. Ukridge’s eye met mine in a wild surmise. He seemed to shrink into his mackintosh like a snail surprised while eating lettuce.

“ Stanley!”

“ Yes, Aunt Julia?” quavered Ukridge.

“ Come here. I wish to speak to you.”

“ Yes, Aunt Julia.”

I sidled out into the road. Inside the cottage the yapping of the Pekingese had become quite hysterical. I found myself trotting, and then—though it was a warm day—running quite rapidly. I could have stayed if I had wanted to, but somehow I did not want to. Something seemed to tell me that on this holy domestic scene I should be an intruder.

What it was that gave me that impression I do not know—probably vision or the big, broad, flexible outlook.