Ukridge Stories

“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 wellsprings 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.”

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.

And five years rolled away.

It was at Barolini’s Italian restaurant in Beak Street that Ukridge evolved his great scheme. Barolini’s was a favourite resort of our little group of earnest strugglers in the days when the philanthropic restaurateurs of Soho used to supply four courses and coffee for a shilling and sixpence; and there were present that night, besides Ukridge and myself, the following men-about-town: Teddy Weeks, the actor, fresh from a six-weeks’ tour with the Number Three “Only a Shop-Girl” Company; Victor Beamish, the artist, the man who drew that picture of the O-So-Eesi Piano-Player in the advertisement pages of the Piccadilly Magazine; Bertram Fox, author of Ashes of Remorse, and other unproduced motion-picture scenarios; and Robert Dunhill, who, being employed at a salary of eighty pounds per annum by the New Asiatic Bank, represented the sober, hardheaded commercial element. As usual, Teddy Weeks had collared the conversation, and was telling us once again how good he was and how hardly treated by a malignant fate.

There is no need to describe Teddy Weeks. Under another and a more euphonious name he has long since made his personal appearance dreadfully familiar to all who read the illustrated weekly papers. He was then, as now, a sickeningly handsome young man, possessing precisely the same melting eyes, mobile mouth, and corrugated hair so esteemed by the theatre-going public today. And yet, at this period of his career he was wasting himself on minor touring companies of the kind which open at Barrow-in-Furness and jump to Bootle for the second half of the week.

It was a most embarrassing moment, one of those moments which plant lines on the face and turn the hair a distinguished grey at the temples. I looked at the barman. The barman looked at me. The assembled company looked at us both impartially.

“Ho!” said the barman.

I am very quick. I could see at once that he was not in sympathy with me. He was a large, profuse man, and his eye as it met mine conveyed the impression that he regarded me as a bad dream come true. His mobile lips curved slightly, showing a gold tooth; and the muscles of his brawny arms, which were strong as iron bands, twitched a little.

“Ho!” he said.

The circumstances which had brought me into my present painful position were as follows. In writing those stories for the popular magazines which at that time were causing so many editors so much regret, I was accustomed, like one of my brother-authors, to take all mankind for my province. Thus, one day I would be dealing with dukes in their castles, the next I would turn right round and start tackling the submerged tenth in their slums. Versatile. At the moment I happened to be engaged upon a rather poignant little thing about a girl called Liz, who worked in a fried-fish shop in the Ratcliff Highway, and I had accordingly gone down there to collect local colour. For whatever Posterity may say of James Corcoran, it can never say that he shrank from inconvenience where his Art was concerned.

The Ratcliff Highway is an interesting thoroughfare, but on a warm day it breeds thirst.

The late Sir Rupert Lakenheath, K.C.M.G., C.B., M.V.O., was one of those men at whom their countries point with pride. Until his retirement on a pension in the year 1906, he had been Governor of various insanitary outposts of the British Empire situated around the equator, and as such had won respect and esteem from all. A kindly editor of my acquaintance secured for me the job of assisting the widow of this great administrator to prepare his memoirs for publication; and on a certain summer afternoon I had just finished arraying myself suitably for my first call on her at her residence in Thurloe Square, South Kensington, when there was a knock at the door, and Bowles, my landlord, entered, bearing gifts.

These consisted of a bottle with a staring label and a large cardboard hatbox. I gazed at them blankly, for they held no message for me.

Bowles, in his ambassadorial manner, condescended to explain.

“Mr. Ukridge,” he said, with the ring of paternal affection in his voice which always crept into it when speaking of that menace to civilisation, “called a moment ago, sir, and desired me to hand you these.”

Having now approached the table on which he had placed the objects, I was enabled to solve the mystery of the bottle. It was one of those, fat, bulging bottles, and it bore across its diaphragm in red letters the single word “Peppo.” Beneath this, in black letters, ran the legend, “It Bucks You Up.”