Ukridge Stories · Ukridge and the Old Stepper (1/3)

Ukridge and the Old Stepper

“Corky, old horse,” said Stanley Featherstonehaugh Ukridge in a stunned voice, “this is the most amazing thing I have heard in the whole course of my existence. I’m astounded. You could knock me down with a feather.”

“I wish I had one.”

“This suit?⁠—this shabby, worn-out suit?⁠—you don’t really mean to stand there and tell me that you actually wanted this ragged, seedy, battered old suit? Why, upon my honest Sam, when I came on it while rummaging through your belongings yesterday, I thought it was just something you had discarded years ago and forgotten to give to the deserving poor.”

I spoke my mind. Any unbiased judge would have admitted that I had cause for warmth. Spring, coming to London in a burst of golden sunshine, was calling imperiously to all young men to rejoice in their youth, to put on their new herringbone-pattern lounge suits and go out and give the populace an eyeful: and this I had been prevented from doing by the fact that my new suit had mysteriously disappeared.

After a separation of twenty-four hours, I had just met it in Piccadilly with Ukridge inside it.

I continued to speak, and was beginning to achieve a certain eloquence when from a taxicab beside us there alighted a small, dapper old gentleman who might have been a duke or one of the better-class ambassadors or something of that sort. He wore a pointed white beard, a silk hat, lavender spats, an Ascot tie, and a gardenia; and if anyone had told me that such a man could have even a nodding acquaintance with S. F. Ukridge I should have laughed hollowly. Furthermore, if I had been informed that Ukridge, warmly greeted by such a man, would have ignored him and passed coldly on, I should have declined to believe it.

Nevertheless, both these miracles happened.

“Stanley!” cried the old gentleman. “Bless my soul, I haven’t seen you for years.” And he spoke, what is more, as if he regretted the fact, not as if he had had a bit of luck that made my mouth water. “Come and have some lunch, my dear boy.”

“Corky,” said Ukridge, eying him stonily for a moment and speaking in a low, strained voice, “let us be getting along.”

“But did you hear him?” I gasped as he hurried me away. “He asked you to lunch.”

“I heard him. Corky, old boy,” said Ukridge gravely, “I’ll tell you. That bloke is best avoided.”

“Who is he?”

“An uncle of mine.”

“But he seemed respectable.”

“That is to say, a stepuncle. Or would you call him step-step? He married my late stepmother’s stepsister. I’m not half sure,” said Ukridge, pondering, “that step-step-step wouldn’t be the correct description.”

These were deep waters, into which I was not prepared to plunge.

“But what did you want to cut him for?”

“It’s a long story. I’ll tell you at lunch.”

I raised a passionate hand.

“If you think that after pinching my spring suiting you’re going to get so much as a crust of bread⁠—”

“Calm yourself, laddie. You’re lunching with me. Largely on the strength of this suit, I managed to get past the outer defenses of the Foreign Office just now and touch old George Tupper for a fiver. Joy will be unconfined.”

“Corky,” said Ukridge, thoughtfully spreading caviar on a piece of toast in the Regent Grillroom some ten minutes later, “do you ever brood on what might have been?”

“I’m doing it now. I might have been wearing that suit.”

“There is no need to go into that again,” said Ukridge with dignity. “I have explained that little misunderstanding⁠—explained it fully. What I mean is, do you ever brood on the inscrutable workings of Fate, and reflect how, but for this or that, you might have been⁠—well, that or this? For instance, but for the old Stepper I would by now be the mainstay of a vast business and in all probability happily married to a charming girl and the father of half a dozen prattling children.”

“In which case, if there is anything in heredity, I should have had to keep my spring suits in a safe deposit.”

“Corky, old horse,” said Ukridge, pained, “you keep harping on this beastly suit of yours. It shows an ungracious spirit which I do not like to see. What was I saying?”

“You were babbling about Fate.”

“Ah, yes.”

Fate {said Ukridge} is odd. Rummy. You can’t say it isn’t. 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. My Aunt Julia, having sailed for America on one of her lecturing tours, had lent me her cottage at Market Deeping in Sussex till her return, with instructions to the local tradesmen to let me have the necessaries of life and chalk them up to her. From some source which at the moment I cannot recollect I had snaffled two pairs of white flannel trousers and a tennis racket. And, finally, after a rather painful scene in the course of which I was compelled to allude to him as a pigheaded bureaucrat, I had contrived to get a couple of quid out of old Tuppy. My position was solid. I ought to have known that luck like that couldn’t last.

Now, in a parting conversation on the platform at Waterloo while waiting for the boat train to start, Aunt Julia had revealed the fact that her motive in sticking me down at her cottage had not been simply to insure that I have a pleasant summer. It seemed that at Deeping Hall, the big house of the locality, there resided a certain Sir Edward Bayliss, O.B.E., a bird deeply immersed in the jute industry. To this day I have never quite got it clear what jute really is; but, anyway, this Sir Edward was the sort of O.B.E. to keep in with, for his business had ramifications everywhere and endless openings for the bright young man. He was, moreover, a great admirer of my aunt’s novels, and she told me in a few and, in parts, tactless words that what I was going down there for was to ingratiate myself with him and land a job. Which, she said⁠—and this was where I thought her remarks lacked taste⁠—would give me a chance of doing something useful and ceasing to be what she called a wastrel and an idler.

Idler! I’ll trouble you! As if for a single day in my life, Corky, I have ever not buzzed about, doing the work of ten men. Why, take the mere getting of that couple of quid from old Tuppy, for instance. Simple as it sounds, I doubt if Napoleon could have done it. Tuppy, sterling fellow though he is, has his bad mornings. He comes down to his office and finds a sharp note from the President of Uruguay or someone on his desk, and it curdles the milk of human kindness within him. On these occasions he becomes so tight that he could carry an armful of eels up five flights of stairs and not drop one. And yet, in less than a quarter of an hour I had got a couple of quid out of him.

Oh, well, women say these things.

Well, I packed a suitcase and took the next train down to Market Deeping. And the first thing for you to do, Corky, before I go on, is to visualize the general layout of the place. My aunt’s cottage (Journey’s End) was here where this bit of bread is. Here, next to it, where I’ve put the potato, was a smallish house (Pondicherry) belonging to Colonel Bayliss, the jute-fancier’s brother. The gardens adjoined, but anything in the way of neighborly fraternizing was prevented for the moment by the fact that the Colonel was away⁠—at Harrogate, I learned later, trying to teach his liver to take a joke. All this expanse here⁠—I’ll mark it with a splash of Worcester Sauce⁠—was the park of Deeping Hall, beyond which was the Hall itself and all the gardens, messuages, pleasances, and so forth that you’d expect.

Got it now? Right.

Well, as you can see from the diagram, the park of the Hall abutted⁠—if that’s the word I want⁠—on the back garden of my cottage. And judge of my emotions when, as I smoked an after-breakfast pipe under the trees on the first morning after my arrival, I saw the most extraordinarily pretty girl riding there. Hither and thither. She came so close once that I could have hit her with an apple. Not that I did, of course.

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. It didn’t take me more than a second to realize that a job involving a connection with this girl was practically the ideal one.

I called at the Hall that afternoon, mentioning my name, and from the very start everything went like a breeze.

I don’t want to boast, Corky⁠—and, of course I’m speaking now of some years ago, before Life had furrowed my brow and given my eyes that haunted look. But I may tell you frankly that at the time when these things happened I was a rather dazzling spectacle. I had just had my hair cut, and the flannel bags fitted me to a nicety, and altogether I was an asset⁠—yes, old horse, a positive asset to any social circle. The days flew by. The O.B.E. was chummy. The girl⁠—her name was Myrtle, and I think she had found life at Market Deeping a bit on the slow side till I arrived⁠—always seemed glad to see me. I was the petted neighbor.

And then, one afternoon, in walked the Stepper.

There have been occasions in my life, Corky, when, if I had seen a strange man with a white beard walking up the path to the front door of the house where I was living, I would have ducked through the back premises and remained concealed in the raspberry bushes till he had withdrawn. But it so happened that at this time my financial affairs were on a sound and solid basis and I hadn’t a single creditor in the world. So I went down and opened the door and found him beaming on the mat.

“Stanley Ukridge?” he said.

“Yes,” I said.

“I called at your aunt’s house at Wimbledon the other day, and they told me you were here. I’m your Uncle Percy from Australia, my boy. I married your late stepmother’s stepsister Alice.”

I don’t suppose anybody with a pointed white beard has ever received a heartier welcome. I don’t know if you have any pet daydream, Corky, but mine had always been the sudden appearance of the rich uncle from Australia you read so much about in novels⁠—the old-fashioned novels, I mean, the ones where the hero isn’t a dope fiend. And here he was, looking as I had always expected him to look. You saw his spats just now; you observed his gardenia. Well, on the afternoon of which I’m speaking, he was just as spatted, fully as gardenia-ed, and in addition wore in his tie something that looked like a miniature Koh-i-noor.

“Well, well, well!” I said.

“Well, well, well!” he said.

He patted my back. I patted his. He said he was a lonely old man who had come back to England to spend his declining years with some congenial relative. I said I was just as keen on finding uncles as he was on spotting nephews. The thing was a love feast.

“You can put me up for a week or two, Stanley?”

“Delighted.”

“Nice little place you have here.”

“Glad you like it.”

“Wants a bit of smartening up, though,” said the Stepper, looking round at the appointments and not seeming to think a lot of them. Aunt Julia had furnished the cottage fairly sparsely.

“Perhaps you’re right.”

“Some comfortable chairs, eh?”

“Fine.”

“And a sofa.”

“Splendid.”

“And perhaps a nice little summerhouse for the garden. Have you a summerhouse?”

I said no. No summerhouse.

“I’ll be looking about for one,” said the Stepper.

And everything I had read about rich uncles from Australia seemed to me to have come true. Spacious is the only word to describe his attitude. He was like some Eastern monarch giving the court architect specifications for a new palace. This, I told myself, was how these fine, breezy, Empire-building fellows always were⁠—generous, openhanded, gaily reckless of expense. I wished I had met him earlier.

“And now, my boy,” said the old Stepper, sticking out from six to eight inches of tongue and running same round his lips, “where do you keep the drinks?”

I’ve always maintained, and I always will maintain, that there’s nothing in this world to beat a real bachelor establishment. Men have a knack of making themselves comfortable which few women can ever achieve. My Aunt Julia’s idea of a chair, for instance, was something antique made to the order of the Spanish Inquisition. The Stepper had the right conception. Men arrived in vans and unloaded things with slanting backs and cushioned seats, and whenever I wasn’t over at the Hall I wallowed in these.

The Stepper wallowed in them all the time. Occasionally he put in an hour or so in the summerhouse⁠—for he had caused a summerhouse to appear at the bottom of the garden⁠—but mostly you would find him indoors with all the windows shut and something to drink at his elbow. He said he had had so much fresh air in Australia that what he wanted now was something he could scoop out with a spoon.

Once or twice I tried to get him over to the Hall, but he would have none of it. He said from what he knew of O.B.E.s he wouldn’t be allowed to take his boots off, and ran, moreover, a grave risk of being offered barley water. Apparently he had once met a teetotal O.B.E. in Sydney and was prejudiced. However, he was most sympathetic when I told him about Myrtle. He said that, though he wasn’t any too keen on matrimony as an institution, he was broad-minded enough to realize that there might quite possibly be women in the world unlike his late wife. Concerning whom he added that the rabbit was not, as had been generally stated, Australia’s worst pest.

“Tell me of this girl, my boy,” he said. “You squeeze her a good deal in dark corners, no doubt?”

“Certainly not,” I said stiffly.

“Then things have changed very much since my young days. What do you do?”

I said I looked at her quite a lot and hung on her every word and all that sort of thing.

“Do you give her presents?”

He had touched on a subject which I had intended to bring up myself when I could find an opening. You see, Myrtle’s birthday was approaching, and, though nothing had actually been said about my little gift, I had sensed a certain expectation in the air. “Even the best of girls are like that, Corky. They say how old they feel with another birthday coming along so soon, and then they look brightly at you.”

“Well, as a matter of fact, Uncle Percy,” I said, flicking a speck of dust off his sleeve, “I was rather planning something of the kind, if only I could see my way to managing it. It’s her birthday next week, Uncle Percy, and it crossed my mind that if I could stumble on somebody who could slip me a few quid, something might possibly be done about it, Uncle Percy.”

He waved his hand in an Australian sort of way.

“Leave it all to me, my boy.”

“Oh, no, really!”

“I insist.”

“Oh⁠—if you insist.”

“My late wife was your late stepmother’s stepsister, and blood is thicker than water. Now, let me see,” mused the old Stepper, wriggling his feet a couple of inches farther on to the table and knitting the brow a bit. “What shall it be? Jewelry? No. Girls like their little bit of jewelry, but perhaps it would scarcely do. I have it. A sundial!”

“A what?” I said.