Ukridge Stories quotes

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

“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.

“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.

A blaze of yellow on the platform of Sheep’s Cray Station next morning informed me that Ukridge had come to meet my train. The sun poured down from a cloudless sky, but it took more than sunshine to make Stanley Featherstonehaugh Ukridge discard his mackintosh.

He looked like an animated blob of mustard.

When the train rolled in, he was standing in solitary grandeur trying to light his pipe, but as I got out I perceived that he had been joined by a sad-looking man, who, from the rapid and earnest manner in which he talked and the …

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.

Nickerson reentered 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.

“Well?”

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.”

“When I think,” he said, “of all the money that’s locked up in that poor fainthearted fish, just waiting to be released, I could sob. Sob, laddie, like a little child. I never liked that man—he has a bad eye and waves his hair.

Never trust a man who waves his hair, old horse.

”

and the only people who were not down with ptomaine poisoning were those who had walked over cliffs, driven motors into walls, tripped over manholes, or assumed on too slight evidence that the gun was not loaded.

In a crippled world, it seemed, Teddy Weeks walked alone, whole and glowing with health.

It was one of those grim, ironical, hopeless, grey, despairful situations which the Russian novelists love to write about, and I could not find it in me to blame Ukridge for taking direct action in this crisis.

The five cooks ceased their reminiscences of other and smarter weddings at which they had participated. The cameramen unshipped their cameras. The costermonger moved his barrow of vegetables a pace forward. A dishevelled and unshaven man at my side uttered a disapproving growl.

“Idle rich!” said the dishevelled man.

Out of the church came a beauteous being, leading attached to his arm another being, somewhat less beauteous.

It was some small consolation to me later to remember that I had wanted to include Ukridge in the party, but failed to get hold of him. Dark hours were to follow, but at least Ukridge did not go through them bursting with my meat.

There is no form of spiritual exaltation so poignant as that which comes from winning even a third prize in a sweepstake.

So tremendous was the moral uplift that, when eleven o’clock arrived, it seemed silly to sit talking in a club and still sillier to go to bed.

We scattered in cabs to our various homes.

How seldom in this life do we receive any premonition of impending disaster.

I hummed a gay air as I entered the house in Ebury Street where I lodged, and not even the usually quelling sight of Bowles, my landlord, in the hall as I came in could quench my bonhomie.

I had been passing in my mind a number of good snappy things to say to him, but his appearance touched me to such an extent that I held them in.

To abuse this man would have been like dancing on a tomb.

“For Heaven’s sake what’s the matter?” I asked. “You look like a toad under the harrow.”

His looks! She didn’t want his looks spoiled. Why, damme, he hasn’t got any looks. There isn’t any possible manner in which you could treat that man’s face without improving it. I argued with her by the hour, but no, she couldn’t see it.

Avoid women, laddie, they have no intelligence.

”

In fact, I rather overdid my approval, for it encouraged him to borrow another five shillings; and before he left we were in treaty over a further deal which was to entail my advancing him half a sovereign in one solid payment.

Business breeds business.

For the next ten days I saw nothing of Ukridge.

“He doesn’t seem to want any house. He looks quite satisfied with the great open spaces.”

“Poor old Hank’s a bit under the weather,” explained Ukridge, regarding his stricken friend with tolerant sympathy.

“It takes him this way. The fact is, old man, it’s a mistake for these blokes to come into money. They overdo things.

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.”

“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.”

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.

Her stony blue eyes were fixed on me with an expression that was not exactly loathing, but rather a cold and critical contempt.

So might a fastidious cook look at a black-beetle in her kitchen.

“No,” I replied, “I am not.”

In a flash I had changed from a black-beetle to a godlike creature, able, if conciliated, to do a bit of that logrolling which is so dear to the heart of the female novelist. And she had not conciliated me.

Of all sad words of tongue or pen, the saddest are these: It might have been.

It is too much to say that her jaw fell, but certainly the agony of this black moment caused her lips to part in a sort of twisted despair. But there was good stuff in this woman. She rallied gamely.

I am bound to say the comparison impressed me.

It is odd how these little incidents of one’s boyhood linger in the memory.

Across the years I could see Ukridge now, half doubled up, one gloved hand caressing his diaphragm, a stunned and horrified bewilderment in his eyes.

“ ’R!” said Mr. Billson. He frowned.

“Beer,” he proceeded, with cold austerity, “ain’t right. Sinful, that’s what beer is. It stingeth like a serpent and biteth like a ruddy adder.”

My mouth watered a little. Beer like that was what I had been scouring the country for for years. I thought it imprudent, however, to say so.

The expression, considering the circumstances, could hardly have been less happily chosen. Ukridge winced painfully, then spoke in no uncertain voice.

“I’m not going to fight!”

Mr. Previn’s exuberance fell from him like a garment. His cigar dropped from his mouth, and his beady eyes glittered with sudden consternation.

There was no vacillation or uncertainty now about Wilberforce Billson. He plainly considered that he had done all that could reasonably be expected of any pacifist.

A man has only two cheeks.

He flung up a mast-like arm, to block a third blow, countered with an accuracy and spirit which sent his aggressor reeling to the ropes;

“Then why, you poor woollen-headed fish,” bellowed Ukridge, exploding, “why on earth didn’t you stop him?”

“I never thought of that,” admitted Mr. Billson, apologetically.

Ukridge laughed a hideous laugh.

“I could not say, sir,” replied Bowles.

At this point the hatbox, which had hitherto not spoken, uttered a crisp, sailorly oath, and followed it up by singing the opening bars of “Annie Laurie.”

It then relapsed into its former moody silence.

“For Gord’s sake!” ejaculated Bowles.

“Have a nut,” observed the hatbox, hospitably. “Have a nut.”

“It’s a bird, sir. A parrot!”

Got that nasty steely look in her eyes and began to talk about clandestine meetings and things being kept from her. It was an occasion for the swiftest thinking, laddie. I got an inspiration. I played up my aunt. It worked like magic.

It seems the old lady has long been an admirer of her novels, and has always wanted to meet her.

She went down and out for the full count the moment I introduced my aunt into the conversation, and I have had no trouble with her since.”

I looked at her with interest and something bordering on awe. This was the girl who had actually committed herself to the appalling task of going through life as Mrs. Stanley Featherstonehaugh Ukridge—and, what is more, seemed to like the prospect.

Of such stuff are heroines made.

“Thank you,” I said, putting the papers on the desk. “By the way, may I—I hope you will—What I mean is, Ukridge told me all about it. I hope you will be very happy.”

“Best thing in the world,” I assured her.

“Too much peace of mind leads to premature old age.”

“All the same, I have never felt so wicked and ashamed of myself. And I know Stanley felt just like that, too.”

Julia Ukridge was a civilised woman, and this handicapped her in the contest. For people may say what they like about the artificialities of modern civilisation and hold its hypocrisies up to scorn, but there is no denying that it has one outstanding merit.

Whatever its defects, civilisation prevents a gently-bred lady of high standing in the literary world from calling a man a liar and punching him on the nose, however convinced she may be that he deserves it.

Miss Ukridge’s hands twitched, her lips tightened, and her eyes gleamed bluely—but she restrained herself. She shrugged her shoulders.

I looked at my watch.

“About now,” said Ukridge, dully, “my aunt is starting to give the old lady an earful!”

Lady Lakenheath was never, even at the best of times, what I should call a sparkling woman, but it seemed to me, as I sat with her at tea on the following afternoon, that her manner was more sombre than usual.

Ukridge seemed to muse for a moment, and a happy smile irradiated his face.

“About now,” he said, complacently, “my aunt is out in the Channel somewhere. And I see by the morning paper that there is a nasty gale blowing up from the southeast!”

“Life, laddie,” said Ukridge, “is very rum.”

He had been lying for some time silent on the sofa, his face toward the ceiling; and I had supposed that he was asleep. But now it appeared that it was thought, not slumber that had caused his unwonted quietude.

Ukridge did not answer. There was a curious, faraway look on his face, and he uttered a sound like the last gurgle of an expiring soda-water siphon, which I took to be his idea of a sigh. I saw what had happened.

There is a certain hour at the day’s beginning which brings with it a strange magic, tapping wells of sentiment in the most hard-boiled.

In this hour, with the sun pinking the eastern sky and the early bird chirping over its worm, Stanley Featherstonehaugh Ukridge, that battered man of wrath, had become maudlin;

Well, you know what the Fulham Road’s like.

A top hat has about as much chance in it as a rabbit at a dog show.

I dashed after the thing with all possible speed, but what was the use? A taxicab knocked it sideways toward a bus, and the bus, curse it, did the rest.

So swift were my mental processes that the time that elapsed between the sight of that ruined hat and my decision to pop round to the Foreign Office and touch George Tupper for another fiver was not more than fifty seconds.

It is in the crises of life that brains really tell.

You can’t accumulate if you don’t speculate. So, though funds were running a bit low by this time, I invested a couple of bob in a cab.

It is in the crises of life that brains really tell.

You can’t accumulate if you don’t speculate.

So, though funds were running a bit low by this time, I invested a couple of bob in a cab. It was better to be two shillings out than to risk getting to the Foreign Office and finding that Tuppy had left.

But just for the moment you must be patient. Why, dash it, Mrs. Beale,” I said warmly, “you know as well as I do that in all financial transactions a certain amount of credit is an understood thing.

Credit is the lifeblood of commerce. Without credit commerce has no elasticity.

So bring the hat and coat, and later on we will thresh this matter out thoroughly.”

It was no good. She stood firm on her demand for two pounds three and sixpence ha’penny and nothing I could say would shift her. I offered her double the sum at some future date, but no business was done.

The curse of the landladies as a class, Corky, and the reason they never rise to ease and opulence, is that they have no vision.

They do not understand high finance. They lack the big, broad, flexible outlook which wins to wealth. The deadlock continued, ad finally she went off, leaving me dished once more.

… him as toward one who held my destinies in his hand and who could, if well disposed, give me a job which would keep the wolf from the door while I was looking round for something bigger and more attuned to my vision and abilities.

Love, on the other hand, was shouting to me to pinch his coat and hat and leg it for the open spaces.

It was the deuce of a dilemma.

“Ah, Tuppy,” I said genially.

George Tupper is a man with a heart of gold, but he is deficient in tact.

“How the deuce did you get here?” he asked.

… some men, no doubt, with whom I might have been able to pass the whole thing off with a light laugh, but that glimpse I had had of him as he bellowed out of the window told me that he was not one of them.

I faded away, Corky, old horse, just faded away.

And about a couple of months later I read in the paper that Mabel had married the Bart.

“I have an absolutely safe double for Kempton Park on the fifteenth, and even a modest investment would bring me in several hundred pounds. But bookies, blast them, require cash down in advance, so where am I?

Without capital, enterprise is strangled at birth.

”

A man of greater strength of mind would, no doubt, have asked what Buttercup Day was, but

I have a spine of wax.

I produced the first decent-sized coin on which my fumbling fingers rested, and slipped it into her box. She thanked me with a good deal of fervour and pinned one of the yellow objects in my buttonhole.

I had reached the front door and was about to open it, when it suddenly opened itself, and the next moment I was gazing into the clear blue eyes of Ukridge’s aunt Julia.

There are certain people in this world in whose presence certain other people can never feel completely at their ease.

Notable among the people beneath whose gaze I myself experience a sensation of extreme discomfort and guilt is Miss Julia Ukridge, author of so many widely-read novels and popular after-dinner speaker at the better class of literary reunion.

“Oh, ah!” I said; and once more was afflicted by that curious sensation of having swelled in a very loathsome manner about the hands and feet.

I have observed my hands from time to time during my life and have never been struck by anything particularly hideous about them: but whenever I encounter Miss Julia Ukridge they invariably take on the appearance and proportions of uncooked hams.

“Did you tell me, Mr. Corcoran,” said the woman in that quiet, purring voice which must lose her so many friends, not only in Wimbledon but in the larger world outside, “that you saw Mr.

… she was selling those buttercups and—in spite of a strong stammer—put it to her so eloquently that she was obtaining money under false pretences that she gave him the entire takings for his Church Expenses Fund and went home, resolved to lead a better life.

Women are an unstable, emotional sex, laddie. Have as little to do with them as possible.

And, for the moment, give me a drink, old horse, and mix it fairly strong. These are the times that try men’s souls.”

I know a good thing when I see one. This was a good thing, and I recognized it as such. But how to acquire the necessary capital was the point. Always my stumbling-block, that has been.

I wish I had a shilling for every time I’ve failed to become a millionaire through lack of the necessary capital.

What sources of revenue had I, I asked myself. George Tupper, if tactfully approached, is generally good for a fiver; and you, no doubt, had it been a matter of a few shillings or half a sovereign, would gladly have leaped into the breach.

Well, laddie, there ensued a pretty painful scene.

Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned, and not many like a woman who wants a brooch and isn’t allowed to get it.

The atmosphere, when we parted, was full of strain.

I don’t know which distressed me the more, his sickening want of ordinary trust or his absurd respect for appearances.

The man seemed to go through the world in a restless fear lest some action of his might make him look silly.

And he couldn’t possibly have looked sillier than he did about two minutes later.

I’d look silly, wouldn’t I, giving you fifty quid for playing with dogs? But, if you like doing it, you go on playing with him while I step down the road and get some water from one of those other cottages.”

Black-hearted. That, Corky, is the only adjective.

It seemed to me at that moment as though this bloke Joe had allowed me to peer into his soul; and it was like looking into a dark cellar on a moonless night.

Lots of people have noticed it. And one of the rummiest things about it is the way it seems to take a delight in patting you on the head and lulling you into security and then suddenly steering your foot on to the banana skin.

Just when things appear to be going smoothest, bang comes the spanner into the machinery, and there you are.

Take this business I’m going to tell you about. Just before it happened I had begun to look upon myself as Fortune’s favorite child. Everything was breaking right in the most astounding fashion.

I don’t know if you have ever been in love at first sight, Corky?

One moment I was looking idly through the hedge to see where the hoof beats came from; the next I was electrified from head to foot, and in the bushes around me a million birds had begun to toot.

I gathered at once that this must be the O.B.E.’s daughter, or something on those lines, and I found my whole attitude toward the jute business, which up till then had been what you might call lukewarm, changing in a flash.