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 any 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 step-mother’s step-sister, 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? Jewellery? No. Girls like their little bit of jewellery, but perhaps it would scarcely do. I have it. A sundial.”
“A what?” I said.
“A sundial,” said the old Stepper. “What could be a more pretty and tasteful gift? No doubt she has a little garden of her own, some sequestered nook which she tends with her own hands and where she wanders in maiden meditation on summer evenings If so, she needs a sundial.”
“But, Uncle Percy,” I said doubtfully, “do you really think–? My idea was rather that if you could possibly let me have a fiver—or say a tenner—to make up the round sum–”
“She draws a sundial,” said the old Stepper firmly, “and likes it.”
I tried to reason with the man.
“But you can’t get a sundial,” I urged.
“I can get a sundial,” said the old Stepper, waving his whisky and soda with a good deal of asperity. I can get anything. Sundials, summer-houses, elephants if you want them. I’m noted for it. Show me the man who says that Charles Percy Cuthbertson can’t get a sundial, and I’ll give him the lie in his teeth. That’s where I’ll give it him. In his teeth!”
And, as he seemed to be warming up a bit, we left it at that I never dreamed that he would make good, of course. You’ll admit, I think, Corky, that I’m a pretty gifted fellow, but if anyone called upon me at practically a moment’s notice to produce a sundial, I should be nonplussed. Nevertheless, bright and early on the morning of Myrtle’s birthday I heard a yodel under my window, and there he was, standing beside a wheel-barrow containing sundial complete as per invoice. It all seemed to me more like magic than anything, and I began to feel like Aladdin. Apparently my job from now on was simply to rub the lamp and the Stepper would do the rest.
“There you are, my boy,” he said, dusting the thing off with a handkerchief and regarding it in a fatherly sort of way. “You give the little lady that and she’ll let you cuddle her behind the front door.”
This struck a slightly jarring note, of course. He seemed to me to be taking an entirely too earthy view of my great love, which was intensely spiritual. But it was not the moment to say so.
“That’ll make her clap her hands prettily. That’ll send her singing about the house.”
“She ought to like it,” I agreed.
“Of course she’ll like it. She’d damn’ well better like it. Show me a wholesome, sweet-minded English girl who doesn’t like a sundial and I’ll paste her on the nose,” said the Stepper warmly. “Why, it’s got a motto and everything.”
And so it had. We hadn’t spotted it at first, the contrivance having been more or less covered with moss; but the Stepper had worked briskly with a table-knife and now you got a good view of it. Some rot, if I recollect rightly, about ye sunne and ye shoures, carved in old English letters. It seemed to alter the whole aspect of the sundial—lift it, as it were, into a higher and more dignified class; and for the first time I began to get really enthusiastic.
“This is the goods, Uncle Percy,” I said. “This is the right stuff. How can I thank you enough?”
“You can’t,” said the Stepper.
“I’ll tell you what the procedure here is,” I said. “I’ll take this thing over to the Hall this morning and ask Myrtle and her father to come to tea. They can’t refuse when they’ve just been handed a sundial like this.”
“Certainly,” said the Stepper. “A very good idea. Ask them here to tea, and I’ll make the house a bower of roses.”
“Can you get roses?”
“Can I get roses! Don’t keep asking me if I can get things. Of course I can get roses. And eggs, too.”
“We shan’t want eggs.”
“We shall want eggs,” said the Stepper, beginning to hot up again. “If eggs are good enough for me, they’re good enough for the pop-eyed daughter of a blighted O.B.E. Or don’t you think so?”
“Oh, quite, Uncle Percy, quite,” I said.
I would have liked to inform him that Myrtle wasn’t pop-eyed’ but he didn’t seem in the mood.
Any doubts I may have had as to the acceptability of my birthday present vanished as soon as, with infinite sweat, I had wheeled it across the park in its barrow. The Stepper had had the right idea. Myrtle was all over the sundial. I sprang the tea invitation, and for the moment it looked as if there was going to be a hitch. Her Uncle Philip, the Colonel, it seemed, was due to materialize that afternoon. He always made a point of being present for his niece’s birthday, however far he had to come to be there, and he would be terribly hurt if he arrived and found she had let him down. What to do?
“Bring him along,” I said, of course. And we arranged it on those lines. The Colonel, on getting off the train and going to the Hall, would find a note instructing him to hoof it across the park and come and revel at Journey’s End. I didn’t say so to Myrtle, for the time did not seem to me ripe, but what it amounted to, I felt, was that the Colonel, would come seeking a niece and would find in addition a nephew. Than which, for a bloke getting on in years and needing all the loved ones round him that could be assembled, what could be a jollier surprise? I disagree with you, Corky. It does not depend on the kind of nephew. Any nephew is a boon to a lonely bachelor like that.
So I wheeled the wheelbarrow back to the cottage, feeling that all was well. And at about half-past four the maid who came in from the village by the day to do our cooking and washing-up announced Sir Edward and Miss Bayliss.
I’m an old campaigner now, Corky, and Fate has to take its coat off and spit on its hands a bit if it wants to fool me. To-day, when Fate offers me something apparently gilt-edged, I look it over coldly and assume, till it has been proved otherwise, that attached to it somewhere there is a string. But at the time of which I am speaking I was younger, more buoyant, more credulous; and I honestly supposed that this tea-p
arty of mine was going to be the success it seemed at the start.
The thing had got under way without a suspicion of anything in the nature of a disaster. In the first place, the maid had responded to my coaching in the most admirable manner. A simple child of the soil, her natural disposition would have been to bung the door open and bellow: “They’re here!” Instead of which, she had done the announcing with a style and polish that gave the whole proceedings a tone from the very outset. Secondly, Sir Edward had not bumped his head against the beam on the ceiling just inside the front door. And, lastly, though the Stepper’s roses were present in wonderful profusion, he himself hadn’t shown up. And that seemed to me the biggest stroke of luck of the lot.
You see, the old Stepper wasn’t everybody’s money. To begin with, he had an apparently incurable dislike of O.B.E.‘s, and then he combined with a hot-blooded and imperious nature the odd belief that eggs were a suitable food for adult human beings at five o’clock in the afternoon. And he was so touchy, too, so ready to resent opposition. I had had visions of him standing over Sir Edward and shoving eggs down his throat at the point of a table-knife. He was better away, and I hoped he had fallen into a ditch and couldn’t get out.
From the moment the first drop of tea was poured everything went as smooth as oil. In recent years, Corky, affairs have so shaped themselves that you have had the opportunity of seeing me mainly in the capacity of a guest; but you can take it from me that, vouchsafed the right conditions, I can be a very sparkling host. Give me a roof over my head, plenty of buttered toast, and no creditors in sight, and I shine with the best of them.
On the present occasion I was at the top of my form. I handed cups. I slid the toast about. I prattled merrily. And I could see the old boy was impressed. These O.B.E.‘s are silent, reserved men, and for a while he just looked at me from time to time in a meditative way. Then, as he was dipping into his third cup of tea, out he came into the open and began to talk turkey.
“Your aunt… Have you heard from her, by the way?”
“Not yet. I suppose she’s very busy.”
“I imagine so. An energetic woman.”
“Very. All we Ukridges are energetic. We do not spare ourselves.”
“Your aunt,” resumed the old boy, swallowing some more tea, “gave me the impression in one of the conversations we had before she left England that you were looking out for an opening in the world of commerce.”
“Yes,” I said. I stroked my chin thoughtfully and tried to look as much as possible like Charles M. Schwab being approached by the President of the United States Steel Corporation with a view to a merger. You’ve got to show these birds that you’ve a proper sense of your own value. Start right with them, or it’s no use starting at all. “I might accept commercial employment if the salary and prospects were undeniable.” He cleared his throat.
“In my own business,” he was beginning, “the jute business—“
Just then the door opened and the maid appeared. She was one of those snorting girls, and she snorted something about a gentleman. I couldn’t get it.
“Who’s a gentleman?” I said.
“Outside. He says he wants to see you.”
“It must be Uncle Philip,” said Myrtle.
“Of course,” I said. “Show him in. Don’t keep him waiting, my good girl. Show him in at once.”
And a moment later in came a bloke. Obviously not the Colonel, for Myrtle and the O.B.E. gave no sign of recognition. Then who? The man was a perfect stranger to me.
However, I played the host.
“Good afternoon,” I said, affably.
“Afternoon,” said the bloke.
“Take a chair,” I said.
“I’m going to take all the chairs,” he said. “And the sofa, too. I’m from the Mammoth Furnishing Company, and the cheque for the deposit on this stuff has been returned Refer to Drawer.”
It is not too much to say, Corky, that I reeled. Yes, laddie, your. old friend tottered and would have fallen had he not clutched at a chair. And, from the look in the bloke’s eye, it began to seem that my chances of clutching at that particular chair were likely to be very soon a thing of the past. He had one of those brooding eyes. Two, probably, only there was a patch over the left one. I think someone must have hit him there. A fellow like that could scarcely go through life without getting punched in the eye.
“But, my dear old horse…” I began.
“It’s no use arguing. We’ve written twice and never got an answer, and I’ve instructions from the firm to take the stuff.”
“But we’re using it.”
“Not now,” said the blighter. “You’ve finished.”
I look back on that moment, Corky, old boy, as one of the worst in my career. It is always a nervous business for a fellow to entertain for the first time the girl he loves and her father; and, believe me, it doesn’t help pass things off when a couple of the proletariat in shirt-sleeves surge into the room and start carrying out all the chairs. Conversation during the proceedings was, you might say, at a standstill; and even after the operations were over it wasn’t any too easy to get it going again.
“Some absurd mistake,” I said.
“No doubt,” said the O.B.E.
“I shall write those people a very stiff letter to-night.”
“No doubt.”
“That furniture was bought by my uncle, one of the wealthiest
men in Australia. It’s absurd to suppose that a man of his stand-
ing would–”
“No doubt. Myrtle, my dear, I think we will be going.”
Then, Corky, I spread myself. On not a few occasions in a life that has had its ups and downs I have been compelled to do some impressive talking, but now I surpassed all previous efforts. The thought of all that was slipping away from me spurred me to heights I have never reached before or since. And gradually, little by little, I made headway. The old boy tried to shake me off and edge through the french windows, but it is pretty hard to shake me off when I am at my best. I grabbed him by the buttonhole and steered him back into the room. And when, in a dazed sort of way, he reached out and took a slice of cake, I knew the battle was won.
“The way I look at it is this,” I said, getting between him and the window. “A man like my uncle would no doubt have a number of accounts in different banks. The one on which he drew this cheque happened to have insufficient funds in it, and the bank-manager, with gross discourtesy–”
“Well, yes, possibly–”
“I shall tell my uncle of what has occurred–”
At this moment somebody behind me said “Ha!” or it may have been “Ho!” and I spun round, and there in the french window was standing another perfect stranger.
This new addition to our little party was a long, lean, Anglo-Indian-looking individual. You know the type. Beige as to general colour-scheme and rather like a vulture with a white moustache.
“Uncle Philip!” cried Myrtle.
The Vulture gave a kind of nod in her direction. He seemed upset about something.
“Don’t talk to me,” he said. “I haven’t time. Many happy returns of the day and so forth, but don’t talk to me now, child. There’s the man I want to talk to.”
“You know Mr. Ukridge?”
“No, I don’t. And I don’t want to. But I know he’s stolen–“ He broke off with a hideous rattle in his voice, and I saw that he was staring at the table. It belonged to my aunt and was the only thing in the room that the shirt-sleeved birds had left, so it was fairly conspicuous. “Good God!” he said.
He switched an eye round and let it play on me like an oxy-acetylene blowpipe. I don’t know what the treatment for liver is at Harrogate, but they ought to change it. It’s ineffective. It had obviously done this man no good at all.
“Good God!” he said again.
The O.B.E. came to the surface.
“What’s the matter, Philip?” he asked, annoyed. He had only just finished coughing, having swall
owed a bit of cake the wrong way.
“I’ll tell you what’s the matter. I was in my garden just now, and I found it looted—looted! That man there has stripped it of every rose I possess. My roses! The place is a desert.”
“Is this true, Mr. Ukridge?” asked the O.B.E.
“Certainly not,” I said.
“Oh, it isn’t?” said the Vulture. “It isn’t, eh? Then where did those roses come from? There aren’t any rose-trees in the garden of this house. Damn it, I’ve been here half a dozen times and I ought to know. Where did you get those roses? Answer me that.”
“My uncle gave them to me.”
The O.B.E. having now disposed of the cake, uttered a nasty laugh.
“Your uncle!” he said.
“What uncle?” cried the Vulture. “Where’s this uncle? Show me this uncle. Produce him.”
“I’m afraid it would be a little difficult to do that, Philip,” said the O.B.E., and I didn’t at all like his manner. “It appears that Mr. Ukridge possesses a mysterious uncle. Nobody has ever set eyes on him, but it would seem that he buys furniture and does not pay for it; steals roses–”
“And sundials,” put in the Vulture.
“Sundials?”
“That’s what I said. After I’d had a look at my garden I went over to the Hall, and there in the middle of the lawn was my sundial. They told me this fellow here had given it to Myrtle.”
I wasn’t in any too good shape by this time, but I collected enough of the old manly spirit to come back at him.
“How do you know it was your sundial?” I said.
“Because it had my motto on it. And, as if that wasn’t enough, he’s stolen my summer-house.”
The O.B.E. gulped.
“Your summer-house?” he said in a low, almost reverent voice. The spaciousness of the thing seemed to have affected his vocal chords. “How could he have stolen a summer-house?”
Eggs, Beans and Crumpets Page 19
