Ukridge Stories · A Bit of Luck for Mabel (3/3)

Once in the cab, whizzing along and putting more distance between the bloke and myself with every revolution of the wheels, I perked up amazingly. I had been, I confess, a trifle apprehensive until now; but from this moment everything seemed splendid. I forgot to mention it before, but this final top hat which now nestled so snugly on the brow was a gray top hat; and, if there is one thing that really lends a zip and a sort of devilish fascination to a fellow’s appearance, it is one of those gray toppers. As I looked at myself in the glass and then gazed out of the window at the gay sunshine, it seemed to me that God was in his heaven and all right with the world.

The general excellence of things continued. I had a pleasant journey; and, when I got to Ascot, I planked my ten bob on a horse I had heard some fellows talking about in the train, and, by Jove, it ambled home at a crisp ten to one. So there I was, five quid ahead of the game almost, you might say, before I had got there. It was with an uplifted heart, Corky, that I strolled off to the paddock to have a look at the multitude and try to find Mabel. And I had hardly emerged from that tunnel thing that you have to walk through to get from the stand, to the paddock when I ran into old Tuppy.

My first feeling on observing the dear old chap was one of relief that I wasn’t wearing his hat. Old Tuppy is one of the best, but little things are apt to upset him and I was in no mood for a painful scene. I passed the time of day genially.

“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.

“In the ordinary way, laddie,” I said.

“I meant what are you doing here dressed up to the nines like this?”

“Naturally,” I replied with a touch of stiffness, “when I come to Ascot, I wear the accepted morning costume of the well-dressed Englishman.”

“You look as if you had come into a fortune.”

“Yes?” I said, rather wishing he would change the subject. In spite of what you might call the perfect alibi of the gray topper, I did not want to discuss hats and clothes with Tuppy so soon after his recent bereavement. I could see that the hat he had on was a brand new one and must have set him back at least a couple of quid.

“I suppose you’ve gone back to your aunt?” said Tuppy, jumping at a plausible solution. “Well, I’m awfully glad, old man, because I’m afraid that secretary job is off. I was going to write to you tonight.”

“Off?” I said. Having had the advantage of seeing the bloke’s face as he hung out of the window at the moment of our parting, I knew it was off, but I couldn’t see how Tuppy could know.

“He rang me up last night to tell me that he was afraid you wouldn’t do, as he had decided that he must have a secretary who knew shorthand.”

“Oh!” I said. “Oh, did he? Then I’m dashed glad,” I said warmly, “that I pinched his hat. It will be a sharp lesson to him not to raise people’s hopes and shilly-shally in this manner.”

“Pinched his hat? What do you mean?”

I perceived that there was need for caution. Tuppy was looking at me in an odd manner, and I could see that the turn the conversation had taken was once more wakening in him suspicions that he ought to have known better than to entertain of an old school friend.

“It was like this, Tuppy,” I said. “When you came to me and told me about that international spy sneaking your hat from the Foreign Office, it gave me an idea. I had been wanting to come to Ascot, but I had no topper. Of course, if I had pinched yours, as you imagined for a moment I had done, I should have had one; but, not having pinched yours, of course I hadn’t one. So when your friend Bulstrode called on me this morning I collared his. And now that you have revealed to me what a fickle, changeable character he is, I’m very glad I did.”

Tuppy gaped slightly.

“Bulstrode called on you this morning, did you say?”

“This morning at about half-past nine.”

“He couldn’t have done.”

“Then how do you account for my having his hat? Pull yourself together, Tuppy, old horse.”

“The man who came to see you couldn’t have been Bulstrode.”

“Why not?”

“He left for Paris last night.”

“What!”

“He phoned me from the station just before his train started. He had had to change his plans.”

“Then who was the bloke?” I said.

The thing seemed to me to have the makings of one of those great historic mysteries you read about. I saw no reason why posterity should not discuss forever the problem of the bloke in the gray topper as keenly as they do the man in the iron mask. “The facts,” I said, “are precisely as I have stated. At nine-thirty this morning a bird, gayly appareled in morning coat, sponge-bag trousers and gray top hat presented himself at my rooms and⁠—”

At this moment a voice spoke behind me.

“Oh, hullo!”

I turned, and observed the Bart.

“Hullo!” I said.

I introduced Tuppy. The Bart nodded courteously.

“I say,” said the Bart. “Where’s the old man?”

“What old man?”

“Mabel’s father. Didn’t he catch you?”

I stared at the man. He appeared to me to be gibbering. And a gibbering Bart is a nasty thing to have hanging about you before you have strengthened yourself with a bit of lunch.

“Mabel’s father’s in Singapore,” I said.

“No, he isn’t,” said the Bart. “He got home yesterday, and Mabel sent him round to your place to pick you up and bring you down here in the car. Had you left before he arrived?”

Well, that’s where the story ends, Corky. From the moment that pimply baronet uttered those words, you might say that I faded out of the picture. I never went near Onslow Square again. Nobody can say that I lack nerve, but I hadn’t nerve enough to creep into the family circle and resume acquaintance with that fearsome bloke. There are 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.

Ukridge sighed another sigh and heaved himself up from the sofa. Outside, the world was blue-gray with the growing dawn, and even the later birds were busy among the worms.

“You might make a story out of that, Corky,” said Ukridge.

“I might,” I said.

“All profits to be shared on a strict fifty-fifty basis, of course.”

“Of course.”

Ukridge brooded.

“Though it really wants a bigger man to do it justice and tell it properly, bringing out all the fine shades of the tragedy. It wants somebody like Thomas Hardy or Kipling or somebody.”

“Better let me have a shot at it.”

“All right,” said Ukridge. “And, as regards a title, I should call it ‘His Lost Romance’ or something like that. Or would you suggest simply something terse and telling like ‘Fate’ or ‘Destiny’?”

“I’ll think of a title,” I said.