'The fact is, you see, Wimbledon Common is a good address. It means something, lends a lustre. The cognoscenti, hearing it, are impressed. You are one of these City blokes, and you meet another City bloke and say to him casually, "Drop in and see me some time, old man. I am always to be found at The Cedars, Wimbledon Common," and he fawns on you and probably stands you lunch.
'So, as I say, I was flooded, positively inundated with requests to be allowed to sit in. All that remained to do was to throw the handkerchief. I bunged it eventually to a well-chosen six, headed by Lieutenant-Colonel B. B. Bagnew, late of the Fourth Loyal Lincolnshires, and Lady Bastable, widow of one of those birds who get knighted up North. The rest were good, solid fellows who were busy being the backbone of England, but not so busy as to forget to settle up regularly every Friday night.
'They came trooping in, one by one, and presently the nest was full and the venture a going concern.'
Well, it couldn't have been a bigger success (continued Ukridge). Everything from the start was one grand, sweet song. It was idyllic, Corky, that's what it was. I am not a man who speaks hastily. I weigh my words. And I tell you it was idyllic. We were just a great, big, happy family.
Too often in the past it has happened that circumstances have compelled me to appear in the role of guest, but you can take it from me that Nature really intended me for a host. I have the manner, the air. I wish you could have seen me presiding over the dinner-table of a night. Suave, genial, beloved by all. A kind word here, a quick smile there. The aristocrat of the old school, nothing less.
Talk about feasts of Reason and flows of Soul. A pretty high level the conversation round the board invariably touched. The Colonel had his anecdotes of India, where he had served his country faithfully and well. Lady Bastable could tell you some good things about Blackpool in August, though sometimes - in a graver vein - she spoke of the cliqueiness of Huddersfield. And the others were all intelligent, active-minded men who read their evening papers in the train and were never without something sparkling to say about Brighton's A's and the weather.
And after dinner. The quiet rubber. The wireless. The murmur of pleasant talk. The occasional spot of music. Did I say it was idyllic? Well, it was.
Here Ukridge helped himself to another whisky and soda, and sat for a space, brooding.
My Aunt Julia (he resumed), on these occasional absences of hers from the fireside, is never a great correspondent. At least, she very seldom writes to me. The fact that I did not hear from her, therefore, occasioned me no concern. I assumed that she was doing her bit in Hollywood, basking in the pleasant sunshine and being the curse of such parties as she might attend; and, apart from wishing that she had had the vision and enterprise to sign up for three years instead of one, I scarcely gave her a thought.
And then, one afternoon, when I had run into London to lay in a fresh supply of cigars, I happened to meet her friend, Angelica Vining, the poetess, in Bond Street. You may remember this bird, Corky? She was the one who wanted to borrow my aunt's brooch on a certain memorable occasion, but I was firm and wouldn't let her have it - partly on principle and partly because I had pawned it the day before.
Since that episode a certain coldness had existed, but she seemed to have got over it. She now beamed upon me, not without a toothy geniality.
'I suppose you were delighted to hear the news?' she said, after we had exchanged the customary civilities.
'News?' I said, for she had me fogged.
‘About your aunt coming home,' said the Vining.
Have you ever, Corky, during a friendly political discussion in a pub, been punched squarely on the nose? Well, that's how I felt when I heard those words, so casually uttered in the heart of Bond Street. We were standing outside the dog-shop at the moment, and I give you my word that the two Scotties and the bulldog pup in the window suddenly seemed to become four Scotties and two bulldog pups, all shimmering. The ground rocked beneath my feet. 'Coming home?' I gurgled.
'Hasn't she written and told you? Yes, she's sailing home almost immediately.'
And, as in a trance, Corky, I heard the woman relating the events which led up to the tragedy. And the longer I listened, the more solid did my conviction become that my Aunt Julia ought to have been chloroformed at birth.
In that particular studio which had engaged her services, it seems a good deal of latitude is granted to the distinguished authors on the pay-roll. The kindly powers-that-be recognize the existence of the artist temperament and make allowances for it. If, therefore, my aunt had confined herself to snootering directions, harrying camera-men, and chasing supervisors up trees, nothing would have been said. But there is one thing the artist soul must not do at the Colossal-Superfine, and that is swat the Main Boss with a jewelled hand over the ear-hole.
And this, in a moment of emotion due to the fact that he had described some dialogue submitted by her as a lot of boloney that didn't mean a thing, my Aunt Julia had done.
And, as a consequence, she was now headed eastward and, according to the Vining, expected home at any moment.
Well, Corky, you have seen me in some tight places. You have observed your old friend - not once but many times -with his back to the wall and the grim, set smile on his face, and you have come, no doubt, to the conclusion that he is a hard man to beat. And so I am. But here was one occasion when, frankly, I confess, I could not discern the happy ending.
My course, you may say, was obvious. Frightful though the thought might be of closing down what was nothing more or less than a gold-mine, there was nothing for it but to sling my guests out of The Cedars without delay, so that my aunt, returning to the old home, should find it swept and garnished and with no signs of alien occupation.
I saw that, of course, myself. I saw it in a flash. But the difficulty was, how the dickens was it to be done? You see, all my little group of squatters had watertight agreements and were legally entitled to stick on for six months, of which only three had expired. It wasn't a case of just walking in and saying : 'Out you get, all of you!'
A problem of the trickiest. I didn't shine at the dinner-table that night. Many were the comments on my preoccupation. For the first time, the genial Squire of The Cedars was to be observed sitting distrait and silent and contributing nothing to the quips and cranks that flashed like lightning to and from across the board.
After dinner I withdrew into my aunt's study to do some more thinking. And then it occurred to me that, if two heads were better than one, nine would be better still. I was not alone in this enterprise, you will remember. The proceeds of the venture had been split up from the first - in proportions decided upon at a preliminary conference - between myself, the butler, the two parlourmaids, the two housemaids, the cook, the tweeny, and the boy who cleaned the boots. I rang the bell and instructed the butler to summon the shareholders for an extraordinary meeting.
And presently in they filed - the boy who cleaned the boots, the tweeny, the cook, the two housemaids, the two parlourmaids, and the butler. The females got chairs, the males stood against the wall, and I sat on the desk, and, after a few formalities, rose and explained the situation which had arisen.
Considering what a bolt from the blue it was, I must admit that they all took it very well. True, the cook burst into tears and said something about the Wrath of the Lord and the Cities of the Plain - she being a bit on the Biblical side; and one of the housemaids had hysterics. But you have to expect that sort of thing at a critical meeting of shareholders. Somebody lent the cook a handkerchief, and the tweeny soothed the housemaid, and then we settled down to bend our brains to it.
Of course, in a mixed gathering like that, it was to be foreseen that there would be a certain amount of dithering. Some of the suggestions offered were, frankly, goofy. And in saying this I have in mind principally the boy who cleaned the boots.
This stripling was a small, freckled lad who, after being dropped on the head when a baby, appeared to have spent the formative years of his life re
ading sensational fiction. You will scarcely credit it, Corky, but his idea of solving the problem was that we should all dress up as ghosts and scare the «ash customers out of the place. And it will give you some inkling of the state to which I had been reduced by much thinking, that for a moment I actually toyed with the notion. Then the impracticability of the scheme of having a mob of nine spectres of mixed sexes surging about the house swept over me, and I asked him to try again.
This time he advised appointing a quorum to meet my aunt at Southampton and kidnap her and keep her imprisoned in a cellar somewhere till further notice. An attractive by-product of this course of action, he pointed out, was that, if you cut a toe or a finger off from time to time, she could be induced to sign large cheques which would do us all a bit of good.
At this point the butler very properly took the child by the ear and slung him out. And after that things began to clarify. And finally it was agreed upon that a friend of the butler's should come to the house, posing as an inspector of drains, and condemn the system of The Cedars as unfit for human consumption. He had generally found, the butler said, that ladies and gentlemen were sensitive to adverse criticism directed at the drainage systems of the houses which they occupied; and his friend, he thought, would be happy to undertake the job for a pound down, his expenses both ways from Putney, and a glass of beer. And, nobody having anything better to suggest, this ruse was decided upon.
On the following morning, accordingly, I went about sniffing in a suggestive manner and asking my guests if they hadn't noticed an odd smell; and in the afternoon the butler's pal rolled up and got down to the agenda.
I must pay a marked tribute to the butler's pal. In my opinion, he did his work well. There were moments when even I was almost deceived. He had just that rather dingy look and that drooping moustache which seem somehow to go with drains-inspecting. Add a black note-book and a peaked cap of vaguely official aspect, and you have a convincing picture.
But the trouble in this life, Corky, is that you can never be sure when you won't come up against the Man Who. Knows, the nib, the specialist, the fellow who has studied the subject and has no illusions. By seven o'clock, when our chap left, sniffing to the last, five of my six guests had been reduced to so admirable a state of mental collapse that it was plainly only a matter of moments before they started packing. And it was at this juncture that the sixth guest, a fellow of the name of Wapshott, returned to the fold. He had been spending the afternoon at the Oval, watching a cricket match.
Now, in assembling my little family, Corky, I had taken no steps to ascertain their particular walks in life, contenting myself with bankers' references and the like. Imagine my concern, then, when this bloke Wapshott, on learning what had occurred, flung up his head like a war-horse at the note of a bugle, and announced with flashing eyes, that, until his retirement from business six months before, he himself had been an inspector of drains and, what is more, well-known as one of the keenest minds in the profession.
Opening his remarks by relating a striking compliment which had been paid to his acumen and intuition by somebody high up in the drains world in the summer of the year '26, he said with considerable heat that, if anyone was going to tell him there was anything wrong with the system at The Cedars, he would eat his hat. He exhibited the hat - a plush Fedora.
'Show me the man,' he said warmly, "who says I have been living three months in a house without knowing if the drains were all right, and I will give him the he in his teeth.'
And he went on to speak for a while of drains he had met, of drains which had tried to deceive him, and of the pitiful lack of success which such drains had enjoyed.
Well, we couldn't show him the man, because he had had his glass of beer, trousered his quid, and left on a west-bound bus an hour ago. But eager voices described his methods of procedure, and Wapshott simply scoffed, He absolutely scoffed, Corky.
Apparently there is a technique in drains-inspecting. The expert can recognize the touch. For all his peaked cap, for all his note-book and drooping moustache, it was now plain that the butler's pal had betrayed his amateurishness in a dozen ways. He had done the wrong things. He had asked the wrong questions. Even his sniffing came in for criticism.
'The fellow was an impostor,' said Wapshott
'But what could his motive have been?' asked Lady Bastable. 'Such a nice, respectable-looking man, too. He reminded me of one of the Mayors of Huddersfieid.'
Colonel Bagnew gave tongue. I have wondered since if he could have been any relation of the boy who cleaned the boots. Both their minds ran on the same lurid, imaginative lines.
'Advance man of a gang of burglars,' said the Colonel. 'Regular thing with these fellows. They send a chap on first to spy out the land, and then they come charging in, having been thoroughly informed of the topography of the house.'
For a moment, Corky, it seemed as if this suggestion were about to solve everything. The company reacted noticeably. Two of the City blokes looked at one another in a sickly sort of way, and Lady Bastable turned definitely green at the gills.
'Burglars!' she cried. ‘I shall leave immediately.’
And the two City blokes began to mumble something about how lonely and remote these houses on Wimbledon Common were, and how difficult it would be to find a policeman if you wanted one.
And then the Colonel - silly ass - went and spoiled the whole thing.
'Madam,' he said, 'be British! Gentlemen, be men! Are we to be scared from our comfortable home by a few paltry burglars?'
Lady Bastable said she didn't want to be murdered in her bed. The City blokes said nor did they - in their own beds, that was to say - and I tried to push the good work along by saying that I couldn't imagine anything rottener than being murdered in your bed. But the Colonel had now got it thoroughly up his nose. You can never trust these old Indian Army men, Corky. Heroes all of them, and it gets them greatly disliked.
'You little know these scoundrels if you think such a thing possible,' he said. 'A craven crew. Show them a good old Army revolver, and they run like rabbits.'
Lady Bastable said she hadn't got an Army revolver.
'I have,' said the Colonel. 'And my bedroom door is down the passage from yours. Rely on me, madam. At the first cry from you, I shall be out of my door and blazing away like billy-o.'
That turned the scale. The company decided to stay on. And there was I, with all the weary work to do over again.
But it is at just these times, when the ordinary man would be nonplussed, Corky, that your old friend comes out strongest. Peril seems to sharpen his intellect. Of course, you may say that I ought to have thought of it from the first, and I admit the criticism is justified. Still, it wasn't an hour after the discussion I have just outlined before I got the idea which seemed to solve the whole problem.
I saw now that, by fooling about and planning elaborate schemes to cast discredit on the drainage system of The Cedars, I had merely been scratching the surface. What I needed was to go right to the root of the things. I've studied human nature pretty closely, and I know one thing - viz., that, however firmly he may be settled in, you can always dislodge the stoutest limpet by telling him there is infectious illness in the house.
Colonel Bagnew might brandish his Army revolvers and speak sneeringly of burglars, but I was prepared to bet that, if informed that the tweeny was down with scarlet fever, he would be out of the place so quick that you would only see a sort of blur going down the drive.
I put this to the butler, as a knowledgeable man, and after myself the heaviest shareholder, and he agreed with me in toto. He recalled to my mind the occasion when my Aunt Julia, woman of chilled steel though she is, had left the home on learning that one of the housemaids had mumps, and kept on going till she reached Bingley-on-Sea, where she remained three weeks.
It was arranged, therefore, that the tweeny should steal off privately to her mother's next morning and that the butler, after going about looking grave and shaking his head omi
nously for a day or two, should come to me at a moment when I Was surrounded by my little flock and spring the big news.
I previewed the scene over and over again, and could find no flaw in it.
'Might I have a word with you, sir?'
'Yes, Barter? What is it?'
‘I regret to have to inform you, sir, that Jane is far from well.'
'Jane? Jane? Our worthy tweeny? Indeed, Barter? This is certainly most regrettable. Nothing serious, I trust?'
'Yes, sir. I am afraid so, sir.'
'Speak out, Barter. What is it?'
'Scarlet fever, sir, the doctor informs me.’
Sensation followed by immediate stampede of all. I didn't see how it could fail.
However, it is always the unforeseen that pops up and upsets things. At tea time on the following day, just as Barter had dished up the crumpets and withdrawn, shaking his head ominously, a wireless came from my aunt, dispatched in mid-ocean. And I want you to note this wireless very carefully, Corky, and to tell me if it did not justify me in doing what I did.
It ran as follows:
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