“ Then take her, my boy, take her. You will live, of course” — the old man winced — “in London?”
“Yes. And so shall you.”
Sir Murgatroyd shook his head.
“No, no, that dream is ended. It is true that in certain circumstances I had hoped to do so, for the insurance, I may mention, amounts to as much as a hundred thousand pounds, but I am resigned now to spending the rest of my life in this infernal family vault. I see no reprieve.”
“I understand,” said Mordred, nodding. “You mean you have no paraffin in the house?”
Sir Murgatroyd started.
“Paraffin?”
“If,” said Mordred, and his voice was very gentle and winning, “there had been paraffin on the premises, I think it possible that to-night’s conflagration, doubtless imperfectly quenched, might have broken out again, this time with more serious results. It is often this way with fires. You pour buckets of water on them and think they are extinguished, but all the time they have been smouldering unnoticed, to break out once more in — well, in here, for example.”
“Or the billiard-room,” said Lady Sprockett-Sprockett.
“And the billiard-room,” corrected Sir Murgatroyd.
“And the billiard-room,” said Mordred. “And possibly — who knows? — in the drawing-room, dining-room, kitchen, servants’ hall, butler’s pantry and the usual domestic offices, as well. Still, as you say you have no paraffin …”
“My boy,” said Sir Murgatroyd, in a shaking voice, “what gave you the idea that we have no paraffin? How did you fall into this odd error? We have gallons of paraffin. The cellar is full of it.”
“And Annabelle will show you the way to the cellar — in case you thought of going there,” said Lady Sprockett-Sprockett. “Won’t you, dear?”
“Of course, Mother. You will like the cellar, Mordred, darling. Most picturesque. Possibly, if you are interested in paraffin, you might also care to take a look at our little store of paper and shavings, too.”
“My angel,” said Mordred, tenderly, “you think of everything.”
He found his slippers, and hand in hand they passed down the stairs. Above them, they could see the head of Sir Murgatroyd, as he leaned over the banisters. A box of matches fell at their feet like a father’s benediction.
UKRIDGE’S ACCIDENT SYNDICATE
“HALF A MINUTE, LADDIE,” SAID UKRIDGE. AND, gripping my arm, he brought me to a halt on the outskirts of the little crowd which had collected about the church door.
It was a crowd such as may be seen any morning during the London mating-season outside any of the churches which nestle in the quiet squares between Hyde Park and the King’s Road, Chelsea.
It consisted of five women of cook-like aspect, four nursemaids, half a dozen men of the non-producing class who had torn themselves away for the moment from their normal task of propping up the wall of the Bunch of Grapes publichouse on the corner, a costermonger with a barrow of vegetables, divers small boys, eleven dogs, and two or three purposeful-looking young fellows with cameras slung over their shoulders. It was plain that a wedding was in progress — and, arguing from the presence of the camera-men and the line of smart motor-cars along the kerb, a fairly fashionable wedding. What was not plain — to me — was why Ukridge, sternest of bachelors, had desired to add himself to the spectators.
“What,” I enquired, “is the thought behind this? Why are we interrupting our walk to attend the obsequies of some perfect stranger?”
Ukridge did not reply for a moment. He seemed plunged in thought. Then he uttered a hollow, mirthless laugh — a dreadful sound like the last gargle of a dying moose.
“Perfect stranger, my number eleven foot!” he responded, in his coarse way. “Do you know who it is who’s getting hitched up in there?”
“Who?”
“Teddy Weeks.”
“Teddy Weeks? Teddy Weeks? Good Lord!” I exclaimed. “Not really?”
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 ShopGirl” 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, hard-headed 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 to-day. 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. He attributed this, as Ukridge was so apt to attribute his own difficulties, to lack of capital.
“I have everything,” he said, querulously, emphasising his remarks with a coffee-spoon. “Looks, talent, personality, a beautiful speaking-voice — everything. All I need is a chance. And I can’t get that because I have no clothes fit to wear. These managers are all the same, they never look below the surface, they never bother to find out if a man has genius. All they go by are his clothes. If I could afford to buy a couple of suits from a Cork Street tailor, if I could have my boots made to order by Moykoff instead of getting them ready-made and second-hand at Moses Brothers’, if I could once contrive to own a decent hat, a really good pair of spats, and a gold cigarette-case, all at the same time, I could walk into any manager’s office in London and sign up for a Westend production to-morrow.”
It was at this point that Freddie Lunt came in. Freddie, like Robert Dunhill, was a financial magnate in the making and an assiduous frequenter of Barolini’s; and it suddenly occurred to us that a considerable time had passed since we had last seen him in the place. We enquired the reason for this aloofness.
“I’ve been in bed,” said Freddie, “for over a fortnight.”
The statement incurred Ukridge’s stern disapproval. That great man made a practice of never rising before noon, and on one occasion, when a carelessly-thrown match had burned a hole in his only pair of trousers, had gone so far as to remain between the sheets for forty-eight hours; but sloth on so majestic a scale as this shocked him.
“Lazy young devil,” he commented severely. “Letting the golden hours of youth slip by like that when you ought to have been bustling about and making a name for yourself.”
Freddie protested himself wronged by the imputation.
“I had an accident,” he explained. “Fell off nay bicycle and sprained an ankle.”
“Tough luck,” was our verdict.
*‘Oh, I don’t know,” said Freddie. “It wasn’t bad fun getting a rest. And of course there was the fiver.”
“What fiver?”
“I got a fiver from the Weekly Cyclist for getting my ankle sprained.”
“You — what?” cried Ukridge, profoundly stirred — as ever — by a tale of easy money. “Do you mean to sit there and tell me that some dashed paper paid you five quid simply because you sprained your ankle? Pull yourself together, old horse. Things like that don’t happen.”
“It’s quite true.”
“Can you show me the fiver?”
“No; because if I did you would try t
o borrow it.”
Ukridge ignored this slur in dignified silence.
“Would they pay a fiver to anyone who sprained his ankle?” he asked, sticking to the main point.
“Yes. If he was a subscriber.”
“I knew there was a catch in it,” said Ukridge, moodily.
“Lots of weekly papers are starting this wheeze,” proceeded Freddie. “You pay a year’s subscription and that entitles you to accident insurance.”
We were interested. This was in the days before every daily paper in London was competing madly against its rivals in the matter of insurance and offering princely bribes to the citizens to make a fortune by breaking their necks. Nowadays papers are paying as high as two thousand pounds for a genuine corpse and five pounds a week for a mere dislocated spine; but at that time the idea was new and it had an attractive appeal.
“How many of these rags are doing this?” asked Ukridge. You could tell from the gleam in his eyes that that great brain was whirring like a dynamo. “As many as ten?”
“Yes, I should think so. Quite ten.”
“Then a fellow who subscribed to them all and then sprained his ankle would get fifty quid?” said Ukridge, reasoning acutely.
“More if the injury was more serious,” said Freddie, the expert. ‘They have a regular tariff. So much for a broken arm, so much for a broken leg, and so forth.”
Ukridge’s collar leaped off its stud and his pince-nez wobbled drunkenly as he turned to us.
“How much money can you blokes raise?” he demanded.
“What do you want it for?” asked Robert Dunhill, with a banker’s caution.
“My dear old horse, can’t you see? Why, my gosh. I’ve got the idea of the century. Upon my Sam, this is the giltest-edged scheme that was ever hatched. We’ll get together enough money and take out a year’s subscription for every one of these dashed papers.”
“What’s the good of that?” said Dunhill, coldly unenthusiastic.
They train bank clerks to stifle emotion, so that they will be able to refuse overdrafts when they become managers. “The odds are we should none of us have an accident of any kind, and then the money would be chucked away.”
“Good heavens, ass,” snorted Ukridge, “you don’t suppose I’m suggesting that we should leave it to chance, do you? Listen! Here’s the scheme. We take out subscriptions for all these papers, then we draw lots, and the fellow who gets the fatal card or whatever it is goes out and breaks his leg and draws the loot, and we split it up between us and live on it in luxury. It ought to run into hundreds of pounds.”
A long silence followed. Then Dunhill spoke again. His was a solid rather than a nimble mind.
“Suppose he couldn’t break his leg?”
“My gosh!” cried Ukridge, exasperated. “Here we are in the twentieth century, with every resource of modern civilisation at our disposal, with opportunities for getting our legs broken opening about us on every side — and you ask a silly question like that! Of course he could break his leg. Any ass can break a leg. It’s a little hard! We’re all infernally broke — personally, unless Freddie can lend me a bit of that fiver till Saturday, I’m going to have a difficult job pulling through. We all need money like the dickens, and yet, when I point out this marvellous scheme for collecting a bit, instead of fawning on me for my ready intelligence you sit and make objections. It isn’t the right spirit. It isn’t the spirit that wins.”
“If you’re as hard up as that,” objected Dunhill, “how are you going to put in your share of the pool?”
A pained, almost a stunned, look came into Ukridge’s eyes. He gazed at Dunhill through his lop-sided pince-nez as one who speculates as to whether his hearing has deceived him.
“Me?” he cried. “Me? I like that! Upon my Sam, that’s rich! Why, damme, if there’s any justice in the world, if there’s a spark of decency and good feeling in your bally bosoms, I should think you would let me in free for suggesting the idea. It’s a little hard! I supply the brains and you want me to cough up cash as well. My gosh, I didn’t expect this. This hurts me, by George! If anybody had told me that an old pal would — ”
“Oh, all right,” said Robert Dunhill. “All right, all right, all right. But I’ll tell you one thing. If you draw the lot it’ll be the happiest day of my life.”
“I shan’t,” said Ukridge. “Something tells me that I shan’t.”
Nor did he. When, in a solemn silence broken only by the sound of a distant waiter quarrelling with the cook down a speaking-tube, we had completed the drawing, the man of destiny was Teddy Weeks.
I suppose that even in the springtime of Youth, when broken limbs seems a lighter matter than they become later in life, it can never be an unmixedly agreeable thing to have to go out into the public highways and try to make an accident happen to one. In such circumstances the reflection that you are thereby benefiting your friends brings but slight balm. To Teddy Weeks it appeared to bring no balm at all. That he was experiencing a certain disinclination to sacrifice himself for the public good became more and more evident as the days went by and found him still intact. Ukridge, when he called upon me to discuss the matter, was visibly perturbed. He sank into a chair beside the table at which I was beginning my modest morning meal, and, having drunk half my coffee, sighed deeply.
“Upon my Sam,” he moaned, “it’s a little disheartening. I strain my brain to think up schemes for getting us all a bit of money just at the moment when we are all needing it most, and when I hit on what is probably the simplest and yet ripest notion of our time, this blighter Weeks goes and lets me down by shirking his plain duty. It’s just my luck that a fellow like that should have drawn the lot. And the worst of it is, laddie, that, now we’ve started with him, we’ve got to keep on. We can’t possibly raise enough money to pay yearly subscriptions for anybody else. It’s Weeks or nobody.”
“I suppose we must give him time.”
“That’s what he says,” grunted Ukridge, morosely, helping himself to toast. “He says he doesn’t know how to start about it. To listen to him, you’d think that going and having a trifling accident was the sort of delicate and intricate job that required years of study and special preparation. Why, a child of six could do it on his head at five minutes’ notice. The man’s so infernally particular. You make helpful suggestions, and instead of accepting them in a broad, reasonable spirit of co-operation he comes back at you every time with some frivolous objection. He’s so dashed fastidious. When we were out last night, we came on a couple of navvies scrapping. Good hefty fellows, either of them capable of putting him in hospital for a month. I told him to jump in and start separating them, and he said no; it was a private dispute which was none of his business, and he didn’t feel justified in interfering. Finicky, I call it. I tell you, laddie, this blighter is a broken reed. He has got cold feet. We did wrong to let him into the drawing at all. We might have known that a fellow like that would never give results. No conscience. No sense of esprit de corps. No notion of putting himself out to the most trifling extent for the benefit of the community. Haven’t you any more marmalade, laddie?”
“I have not!”
“Then I’ll be going,” said Ukridge, moodily. “I suppose,” he added, pausing at the door, “you couldn’t lend me five bob?”
“How did you guess?”
“Then I’ll tell you what,” said Ukridge, ever fair and reasonable; “you can stand me dinner to-night.” He seemed cheered up for the moment by this happy compromise, but gloom descended on him again. His face clouded, “When I think,” he said, “of all the money that’s locked up in that poor faint-hearted 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.”
Ukridge’s pessimism was not confined to himself. By the end of a fortnight, nothing having happened to Teddy Weeks worse than a slight cold which he shook off in a couple of days, the ge
neral consensus of opinion among his apprehensive colleagues in the Syndicate was that the situation had become desperate. There were no signs whatever of any return on the vast capital which we had laid out, and meanwhile meals had to be bought, landladies paid, and a reasonable supply of tobacco acquired. It was a melancholy task in these circumstances to read one’s paper of a morning.
All over the inhabited globe, so the well-informed sheet gave one to understand, every kind of accident was happening every day to practically everybody in existence except Teddy Weeks. Farmers in Minnesota were getting mixed up with reaping-machines, peasants in India were being bisected by crocodiles; iron girders from skyscrapers were falling hourly on the heads of citizens in every town from Philadelphia to San Francisco; 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. My only regret was that bad luck caused so excellent a plan to miscarry.
My first intimation that he had been trying to hurry matters on came when he and I were walking along the King’s Road one evening, and he drew me into Markham Square, a dismal backwater where he had once had rooms.
“What’s the idea?” I asked, for I disliked the place.
“Teddy Weeks lives here,” said Ukridge. “In my old rooms.” I could not see that this lent any fascination to the place. Every day and in every way I was feeling sorrier and sorrier that I had been foolish enough to put money which I could ill spare into a venture which had all the earmarks of a wash-out, and my sentiments towards Teddy Weeks were cold and hostile.
“I want to enquire after him.”
Wodehouse On Crime Page 25