Love Among the Chickens quotes

It had always been my experience that, when Ukridge was around, things began to happen swiftly and violently, rendering meditation impossible.

Ukridge was the sort of man who asks you out to dinner, borrows the money from you to pay the bill, and winds up the evening by embroiling you in a fight with a cabman.

I have gone to Covent Garden balls with Ukridge, and found myself legging it down Henrietta Street in the grey dawn, pursued by infuriated costermongers.

Nobody talked very much when Ukridge was present. She sat on the edge of the armchair, looking very small and quiet. I was conscious of feeling a benevolent pity for her.

If I had been a girl, I would have preferred to marry a volcano.

A little of Ukridge, as his former headmaster had once said in a moody, reflective voice, went a very long way.

“Immaterial,” said Ukridge with a grand gesture. “That doesn’t matter. The point is that the letters were written. It shows we are solid and practical. Well now, can you get your things ready by tomorrow, Garny old horse?”

Strange how one reaches an epoch-making moment in one’s life without recognising it.

If I had refused that invitation, I would not have—at any rate, I would have missed a remarkable experience. It is not given to everyone to see Stanley Featherstonehaugh Ukridge manage a chicken farm.

But for them, we might have become intimate in the first half hour. As it was, what were we?

Ships that pass in the night!

She would get out at some beastly wayside station, and vanish from my life without my ever having even spoken to her.

… the Waterloo bookstall had never heard of The Manœuvres of Arthur, and that my publishers, whenever I slunk in to ask how it was selling, looked at me with a sort of grave, paternal pity and said that it had not really “begun to move?”

Anybody can write one of those rotten popular novels which appeal to the unthinking public, but it takes a man of intellect and refinement and taste and all that sort of thing to turn out something that will be approved of by a girl like this.

“I wonder who Jeremy Garnet is,” she said. “I’ve never heard of him before. I imagine him rather an old young man, probably with an eyeglass, and conceited. And I should think he didn’t know many girls.

“But not many,” he added.

Beale’s passion for the truth had made him unpopular in three regiments.

“They aren’t so bad,” I said, “but I’m glad I’m not a fowl.”

I was grimly resolute. I had caught Aunt Elizabeth’s eye as she passed me, and the contempt in it had cut me to the quick. This bird despised me. I am not a violent or a quick-tempered man, but I have my self-respect.

I will not be sneered at by hens.

All the abstract desire for Fame which had filled my mind five minutes before was concentrated now on the task of capturing this supercilious bird.

Chase—a lieutenant, I learned later, in His Majesty’s Navy—was shouting directions to me by name. I have never assisted at any ceremony at which formality was so completely dispensed with.

The ice was not merely broken; it was shivered into a million fragments.

“Go in and drive her out, Garnet,” shouted Mr. Chase. “In my direction if you can. Look out on the left, Phyllis.”

Nevertheless, I crawled into the bushes and administered to Aunt Elizabeth a prod in the lower ribs—if hens have lower ribs.

The more I study hens, the more things they seem able to get along without

—which abruptly disturbed her calm detachment. She shot out at the spot where Mr. Chase was waiting with his coat off, and was promptly enveloped in that garment and captured.

“I was surprised to see you at Combe Regis,” I said. “When you got out at Yeovil, I thought I had seen the last of you.”

I think I am gifted beyond other men as regards the unfortunate turning of sentences.

“I meant,” I added, “I was afraid I had.”

The sight of the table, when at length we filed into the dining room, sent a chill through me.

It was a meal for the very young or the very hungry.

The uncompromising coldness and solidity of the viands was enough to appal a man conscious that his digestion needed humouring. A huge cheese faced us in almost a swashbuckling way. I do not know how else to describe it.

Phyllis was with him at the time, and also another girl, who was, I supposed, from the strong likeness between them, her sister. She had the same mass of soft brown hair. But to me she appeared almost commonplace in comparison.

It is never pleasant to be cut dead, even when you have done something to deserve it. It is like treading on nothing where one imagined a stair to be.

In the present instance the pang was mitigated to a certain extent—not largely—by the fact that Phyllis looked at me. She did not move her head, and I could not have declared positively that she moved her eyes; but nevertheless she certainly looked at me.

The days passed slowly. I saw nothing more of Phyllis or her sister. The professor I met once or twice on the links. I had taken earnestly to golf in this time of stress.

Golf is the game of disappointed lovers.

On the other hand, it does not follow that because a man is a failure as a lover he will be any good at all on the links. My game was distinctly poor at first.

Briefly, it was this. Providence had failed to give satisfaction. I would, therefore, cease my connection with it, and start a rival business on my own account.

After all, if you want a thing done well, you must do it yourself.

In other words, since a dramatic accident and rescue would not happen of its own accord, I would arrange one for myself. Hawk looked to me the sort of man who would do anything in a friendly way for a few shillings.

Briefly, it was this.

Providence had failed to give satisfaction. I would, therefore, cease my connection with it, and start a rival business on my own account.

After all, if you want a thing done well, you must do it yourself.

He was in the best of tempers, and I worked strenuously to keep him so. My scheme had been so successful that its iniquity did not worry me. I have noticed that this is usually the case in matters of this kind.

It is the bungled crime that brings remorse.

“We must go round the links together one of these days, Mr. Garnet,” said the professor. “I have noticed you there on several occasions, playing a strong game. I have lately taken to using a wooden putter. It is wonderful what a difference it makes.”

One can’t attend to everything. The business is just now at its most crucial point. It would be fatal to pay any attention to anything else with things as they are. These scoundrels will get paid all in good time.”

It is a peculiarity of situations of this kind that the ideas of debtor and creditor as to what constitutes a good time never coincide.

I am afraid that, despite the urgent need for strict attention to business, I was inclined to neglect my duties about this time.

The situation was saved.

Conversationally, I am like a clockwork toy. I have to be set going.

On the affairs of the farm I could speak fluently. I sketched for her the progress we had made since her visit. I was humorous concerning roop, epigrammatic on the subject of the Hired Retainer and Edwin.

As we wandered down from the garden paths, she gave me her opinion of the book. In the main it was appreciative.

I shall always associate the scent of yellow lupin with the higher criticism.

“Of course, I don’t know anything about writing books,” she said.

“Here, I say, Garnet,” observed Mr. Chase plaintively, “do put me out of this hideous suspense. I’m becoming a mere bundle of quivering ganglions.”

I loathe facetiousness in moments of stress.

I frowned austerely, made no reply, and served another fault, my fifth.

“What’s the matter, old chap?” inquired Ukridge affectionately, glancing up from his pile of bills and forgetting his own troubles in an instant. “Buck up! Aunt Elizabeth been getting on your nerves again? What’s she been saying this time?”

Mrs. Ukridge left the room with a sob. Ukridge sprang at the letter.

“If that demon doesn’t stop writing her infernal letters and upsetting Millie, I shall strangle her with my bare hands, regardless of her age and sex.” He turned over the pages of the letter till he came to the passage which had caused the trouble.

Twice—on two separate occasions—she actually asked my advice about feeding her toy Pomeranian! Well, that shows you!

Bustle ’em, laddie! Bustle ’em!

”

“Ukridge,” I said, “you inspire me.

You would inspire a caterpillar.

I will go to the professor—I was going anyhow, but now I shall go aggressively. I will prise a father’s blessing out of him, if I have to do it with a crowbar.”

And when it’s all over, and he’s torn all his hair out and smashed all his clubs, I shall go and commit suicide off the Cob. Because, you see, if I can’t marry Phyllis, I shan’t have any use for life.”

Bob wagged his tail cheerfully.

“I mean it,” I said, rolling him on his back and punching him on the chest till his breathing became stertorous. “You don’t see the sense of it, I know. But then you’ve got none of the finer feelings.

“I mean it,” I said, rolling him on his back and punching him on the chest till his breathing became stertorous. “You don’t see the sense of it, I know. But then you’ve got none of the finer feelings.

You’re a jolly good dog, Robert, but you’re a rank materialist.

Bones and cheese and potatoes with gravy over them make you happy. You don’t know what it is to be in love. You’d better get right side up now, or you’ll have apoplexy.”

Like the gentleman who played euchre with the Heathen Chinee, I state but facts. I do not, therefore, slur over my scheme for disturbing the professor’s peace of mind.

I am not always good and noble. I am the hero of this story, but I have my off moments.

I felt ruthless towards the professor. I cannot plead ignorance of the golfer’s point of view as an excuse for my plottings.

Once, when he missed the ball clean at the fifth tee, his eye met mine, and we stood staring at each other for a full half-minute without moving. I believe, if I had smiled then, he would have attacked me without hesitation.

There is a type of golfer who really almost ceases to be human under stress of the wild agony of a series of foozles.

The sixth hole involves the player in a somewhat tricky piece of cross-country work, owing to the fact that there is a nasty ditch to be negotiated some fifty yards from the green.

His whole career, as long as I had known him, had been dotted with little eccentricities of a type which an unfeeling world generally stigmatises as shady. They were small things, it was true; but they ought to have warned me.

We are most of us wise after the event. When the wind has blown, we can generally discover a multitude of straws which should have shown us which way it was blowing.

Once, I remembered, in our schoolmaster days, when guineas, though regular, were few, he had had occasion to increase his wardrobe.

This was not, I suppose, Conciliation in the strictest and best sense of the word; but the thing had to be said.

It is the duty of every good citizen to do his best to score off men with whiskers.

“You don’t understand me, sir,” he said excitedly. “When I said we didn’t know where we were, it was a manner of speaking. We want to know how we stand.”

“No,” I said, “I do not.”

He was looking curiously at the expectant band of duns.

I forestalled his question.