“Oh?”
A sudden chill had come over Conky’s dashing mood. The one thing he had always vowed he would never do was marry for money. For years his six uncles and seven aunts had been urging him to cash in on his looks and grab something opulent. They had paraded heiresses before him in droves, but he had been firm. He had his principles.
Of course, in the present case it was different. He loved this girl with every fibre of his being. But all the same … No, he told himself, better wait till his bank balance was actually bulging.
With a strong effort he changed the conversation.
“Well, as I was saying,” he said, “I hope to clean up shortly on an impressive scale, and when I do I’ll never watch another cricket match as long as I live. Arising from which, what on earth are you doing here, holding the views on cricket which you do?”
A slight shadow of disappointment seemed to pass over the girl’s face. It was as if she had been expecting the talk to develop along different lines.
“Oh, I came for a purpose.”
“Eh? What purpose?”
She directed his attention to the rows of living corpses in the pavilion. Lord Plumpton and his friend, having settled the Wodger question were, leaning back with their hats over their eyes. It was difficult to realize that life still animated those rigid limbs.
“When I was here yesterday, I was greatly struck by the spectacle of those stiffs over there. I wondered if it was possible to stir them up into some sort of activity.”
“I doubt it.”
“I’m a little dubious myself. They’re like fish on a slab or a Wednesday matinee audience. Still, I thought I would try. Yesterday, of course I hadn’t elastic and ammo with me.”
“Elastic? Ammo?”
Conky stared. From the recesses of her costume she had produced a piece of stout elastic and a wad of tin foil. She placed the tin foil on the elastic and then between her teeth. Then, turning, she took careful aim at Lord Plumpton.
For a sighting shot it was an admirable effort. Conky, following the projectile with a rapt gaze, saw his uncle start and put a hand to his ear. There seemed little reason to doubt that he had caught it amidships.
“Good Lord!” he cried. “Here, after you with that elastic. I used to do that at school, and many was the fine head I secured. I wonder if the old skill still lingers.”
It was some minutes later that Lord Plumpton turned to the friend beside him.
“Wasps very plentiful this year,” he said.
The friend blinked drowsily.
“Watts?”
“Wasps.”
“There was A. R. K. Watts who used to play for Sussex. Ark we used to call him.”
“Not Watts. Wasps.”
“Wasps?”
“Wasps.”
“What about them?”
“They seem very plentiful. One stung me in the ear just now. And now one of them has knocked off my hat. Most extraordinary.”
A man in a walrus moustache who had played for Surrey in 1911 came along, and Lord Plumpton greeted him cordially.
“Hullo, Freddie.”
“Hullo.”
“Good game.”
“Very. Exciting.”
“Wasps are a nuisance, though.”
“Wasps?”
“Wasps.”
“What Wasps?”
“I don’t know their names. The wasps around here.”
“No wasps around here.”
“Yes.”
“Not in the pavilion at Lord’s. You can’t get in unless you’re a member.”
“Well, one has just knocked off my hat. And look, there goes Jimmy’s hat.”
The walrus shook his head. He stooped and picked up a piece of tin foil.
“Someone’s shooting this stuff at you. Used to do it myself a long time ago. Ah yes,” he said, peering about him, “I see where the stuff’s coming from. That girl over there in the three shilling seats with your nephew. If you look closely, you’ll see she’s drawing a bead on you now.”
Lord Plumpton looked, started and stiffened.
“That girl again! Is one to be beset by her through all eternity?
Send for the attendants! Rouse the attendants and give them their divisional orders. Instruct the attendants to arrest her immediately and bring her to the committee room.”
And so it came about that just as Conky was adjusting the elastic to his lips a short while later and preparing to loose off, a heavy hand fell on his shoulder, and there was a stern-faced man in the uniform of a Marylebone Cricket Club attendant. And simultaneously another heavy hand fell on the girl’s shoulder, and there was another stern-faced man in the uniform of another Marylebone Cricket Club attendant.
It was a fair cop.
The committee room of the Marylebone Cricket Club is a sombre and impressive apartment. Photographs of bygone cricketers, many of them with long beards, gaze down from the walls—accusingly, or so it seems to the man whose conscience is not as clear as it might be. Only a man with an exceptionally clear conscience can enter this holy of holies without feeling that he is about to be stripped of his M.C.C. tie and formally ticketed as a social leper.
This is particularly so when, as in the present instance the President himself is seated at his desk. It was at Lord Plumpton’s request that he was there now. It had seemed to Lord Plumpton that a case of this magnitude could be dealt with adequately only at the very highest levels.
He mentioned this in his opening speech for the prosecution. “I demand,” said Lord Plumpton, “the most exemplary punishment for an outrage unparalleled in the annals of the Marylebone Cricket Club, the dear old club we all love so well, if you know what I mean.” Here he paused as if intending to bare his head, but realizing that he had not got his hat on continued, “I mean to say, taking pot-shots at members with a series of slabs of tin foil, dash it! If that isn’t a nice bit of box fruit, what is? Bad enough, if you see what I’m driving at, to take pot-shots at even the cannaille, as they call them in France, who squash in in the free seats, but when it comes to pot-shotting members in the pavilion, I mean where are we? Personally I would advocate skinning the girl, but if you consider that too extreme I am prepared to settle for twenty years in solitary confinement. A menace to the community, that’s what this girl is. Busting about in her car and knocking people endways with one hand and flicking their hats off with the other, if you follow my drift. She reminds me of … who was that woman in the Bible whose work was always so raw? … Delilah? … No … It’s on the tip of my tongue … Ah yes, Jezebel. She’s a modern streamlined Jezebel, dash her insides.”
“Uncle Everard,” said Conky, “you are speaking of the woman I love.”
The girl gave a little gasp.
“No, really?” she said.
“Absolutely,” said Conky. “I had intended to mention it earlier. I don’t know your name …
“Clarissa. Clarissa Binstead.”
“How many s’s?”
“Three, if you count the Binstead.”
“Clarissa, I love you. Will you be my wife?”
“Sure,” said the girl. “I was hoping you’d suggest it. And what all the fuss is about is more than I can understand. Why when we go to a ball game in America, we throw pop bottles.”
There was a silence.
“Are you an American, madam?” said the President.
“One hundred per cent. Oh, say, can you see … No, I never can remember how it goes after that. I could whistle it for you.”
The President had drawn Lord Plumpton aside. His face was grave and anxious.
“My dear Everard,” he said in an urgent undertone, “we must proceed carefully here, very carefully. I had no notion this girl was American. Somebody should have informed me. The last thing we want is an international incident, particularly at a moment when we are hoping, if all goes well, to get into America’s ribs for a bit of the stuff. I can fully appreciate your wounded feelings …”
“And how about my wounded topper?”
“The club will buy you a new hat, and then, my dear fellow, I would strongly urge that we consider the matter closed.”
“You mean not skin her?”
“No.”
“Not slap her into the cooler for twenty years?”
“No. There might be very unfortunate repercussions.”
“Oh, all right,” said Lord Plumpton sullenly. “Oh, very well. But,” he proceeded on a brighter note, “there is one thing I can do, and that is disinherit this frightful object here. Hoy!” he said to Conky.
“Hullo?” said Conky.
“You are no longer a nephew of mine.”
“Well, that’s a bit of goose,” said Conky.
As he came out of the committee room, he was informed by an attendant that a gentleman wished to speak to him on the telephone. Excusing himself to Clarissa and bidding her wait for him downstairs Conky went to the instrument, listened for a few moments, then reeled away, his eyes bulging and his jaw a-droop. He found Clarissa at the spot agreed upon.
“Hullo, there,” said Conky. “I say, you remember me asking you to be my wife?”
“Yes.”
“You said you would.”
“Yes.”
“Well, the words that spring to the lips are ‘Will you’? Because I’m afraid the whole thing’s off. That was MacSporran on the ‘phone. He said he’d made a miscalculation, and my tenner won’t be enough to start that sea water scheme going. He said he would need another thirty thousand pounds and could I raise it? I said No, and he said ‘Too bad, too bad’. And I said: ‘Do I get my tenner back?’ and he said: ‘No, you don’t get your tenner back.’ So there you are. I can’t marry you.”
Clarissa wrinkled her forehead.
“I don’t see it. Father’s got it in gobs. He will provide.”
“Not for me, he won’t. I always swore I’d never marry a girl for her money.”
“You aren’t marrying me for my money. You’re marrying me because we’re soulmates.”
“That’s true. Still, you appear to have a most ghastly lot of the stuff, and I haven’t a bean.”
“Suppose you had a job?”
“Oh, if I had a job.”
“That’s all right, then. Father runs a gigantic business and he can always find room for another Vice-President.”
“Vice-President?”
“Yes.”
“But I don’t know enough to be a Vice-President.”
“It’s practically impossible not to know enough to be a Vice-President. All you would have to do would be to attend conferences and say ‘Yes’ when Father made a suggestion.”
“What in front of a whole lot of people?”
“Well, at least you could nod.”
“Oh yes, I could nod.”
“Then that’s settled. Kiss me.”
Their lips met long and lingeringly. Conky came out of the clinch with sparkling eyes and a heightened colour. He raised a hand to heaven.
“How’s that, umpire?” he cried.
“Jolly good show, sir,” said Clarissa.
CHAPTER X
Success Story
TO a man like myself, accustomed to making his mid-day meal of bread and cheese and a pint of bitter, it was very pleasant to be sitting in the grill-room of the best restaurant in London, surrounded by exiled Grand Dukes, chorus girls and the better type of millionaire, and realizing that it wasn’t going to cost me a penny. I beamed at Ukridge, my host, and across the table with its snowy napery and shining silver he beamed back at me. He reminded me of a genial old eighteenth-century Squire in the coloured supplement of a Christmas number presiding over a dinner to the tenantry.
“Don’t spare the caviare, Corky,” he urged cordially.
I said I would’t.
“Eat your fill of the whitebait.”
I said I would.
“And when the porterhouse steak comes along, wade into it with your head down and your elbows out at right angles.”
I had already been planning to do this. A man in the dreamlike position of sharing lunch at an expensive restaurant with a Stanley Featherstonehaugh Ukridge who has announced his intention of paying the score does not stint himself. His impulse is to get his while the conditions prevail. Only when the cigars arrived and the founder of the feast, ignoring the lesser breeds, selected a couple that looked like young torpedoes did I feel impelled to speak a word of warning.
“I suppose you know those cost about ten bob apiece?”
“A bagatelle, laddie. If I find them a cool, fragrant and refreshing smoke, I shall probably order a few boxes.”
I drew at my torpedo in a daze. During the past week or two rumours had been reaching me that S. F. Ukridge, that battered football of Fate, was mysteriously in funds. Men spoke of having met him and having had the half-crowns which they automatically produced waved away with a careless gesture and an amused laugh. But I had not foreseen opulence like this.
“Have you got a job?” I asked. I knew that his aunt, the well-known novelist Miss Julia Ukridge, was always trying to induce him to accept employment, and it seemed to me that she must have secured for him some post which carried with it access to the till.
Ukridge shook his head. “Better than that, old horse. I have at last succeeded in amassing a bit of working capital, and I am on the eve of making a stupendous fortune. What at, you ask? That, laddie it is too early to say. I shall look about me. But I’ll tell you one thing. I shall not become master of ceremonies at an East End boxing joint, which was the walk in life which I was contemplating until quite recently. When did I see you last?”
“Three weeks ago. You touched me for a half a crown.”
“Rest assured that you will be repaid a thousandfold. I feed such sums to the birds. Three weeks ago, eh? My story begins about then. It was shortly after that that I met the man in the pub who offered me the position of announcer and master of ceremonies at the Mammoth Palace of Pugilism in Bottleton East.”
“What made him do that?”
“He seemed impressed by my voice. I had just been having a political argument with a deaf Communist at the other end of the bar, and he said he had been looking for a man with a good, carrying voice. He told me that there was an unexpected vacancy, owing to the late incumbent having passed out with cirrhosis of the liver, and said the job was mine, if I cared to take it. Of course, I jumped at it. I had been looking out for something with a future.”
“There was a future in it, you felt?”
“A very bright future. Think it out for yourself. Although the patrons of an institution like that are mostly costermongers and jellied-eel sellers, mingled with these there is a solid body of the intelligentsia of the racing world—trainers, jockeys, stable lads, touts and what not. They all fawn on the master of ceremonies, and it would, I anticipated, be but a question of time before some inside tip was whispered in my ear, enabling me to clean up on an impressive scale. And so I thanked the man profusely and stood him drinks, and it was only after he had about six that he revealed where the catch lay. Quite casually, in the middle of the love feast, he said how much he was looking forward to seeing me standing in the ring in my soup-and-fish.”
Ukridge paused dramatically, gazing at me through the pince-nez which he had fastened to his ears, as always, with ginger-beer wire.
“Soup-and-fish, Corky?”
“That upset you?”
“The words were like a slosh on the third waistcoat button.”
“You mean you hadn’t got dress clothes?”
“Exactly. Some months previously, when I was living with my aunt, she had bought me a suit, but I had long since sold it to defray living expenses. And the man went on to make it sickeningly clear that a master of ceremonies at the Bottleton East Mammoth Palace of Pugilism simply could not get by without what the French call the grande tenue. One can see, of course, why this is so. An M.C. must impress. He must diffuse a glamour. Costermongers and jellie
d-eel merchants like to look on him as a being from another and more rarefied world, and faultless evening dress, preferably with a diamond solitaire in the shirt front, is indispensable.
“So that was that. A stunning blow, you will agree. Many fellows would have fallen crushed beneath it. But not me, Corky. Who was it said: ‘You can’t keep a good man down’?”
“Jonah, taunting the whale.”
“Well, that was what I said to myself. Quickly pulling myself together, I thought the whole thing out, and I saw that all was not lost. A tie, a celluloid collar, a celluloid dickey and a diamond solitaire—you can get them for threepence, if you know where to go—were within my means. The only problem now was securing the actual suit.” He paused, puffing at his cigar.
II
Next day (Ukridge went on) I called upon George Tupper at the Foreign Office, full of the will to win. For the purchase of a second-hand suit of dress clothes it seemed to me that a five should be ample, and if you catch old Tuppy in a good mood, on a morning when mysterious veiled women haven’t been pinching his draft treaties, you can often work him for a flyer.
But the happy ending was not to be. Tuppy was away on holiday. In my opinion, Corky, these pampered bureaucrats take too many holidays and I don’t like it. As one of the people of England, I pay George Tupper his salary, and I expect service.
Still, there it was. I came away and went round to your rooms, only to find that you had locked up all your effects. I would’t let this cold, suspicious frame of mind grow upon me, Corky. It’s bad for the character.
Well, after that, there was nothing left for me to do but go to The Cedars, Wimbledon Common and, endeavour to get into my aunt’s ribs. It was not a task to which I looked forward with a great deal of relish, for we were on distant terms at the time. In fact, when kicking me out of the house, she had firmly stated that she never wished to see my ugly face again.
I did not expect to be effusively welcomed, nor was I. I found her on the point of departure for the Riviera. The car was actually at the door when I arrived, and Oakshott, the butler, was assisting her to enter. On seeing me, she sniffed with a sound like someone tearing a sheet of calico. But she did not actually bat me over the head with her umbrella, so I got in, too, and we drove off.
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