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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Love Among the Chickens, by P. G. Wodehouse
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Love Among the Chickens
+       A Story of the Haps and Mishaps on an English Chicken Farm
+
+Author: P. G. Wodehouse
+
+Illustrator: Armand Both
+
+Release Date: February 6, 2007 [EBook #20532]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK LOVE AMONG THE CHICKENS ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Suzanne Shell, Arthur Robinson, Sankar
+Viswanathan, and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team
+at http://www.pgdp.net
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+   [Illustration: "Never mind the ink, old horse. It'll soak in."]
+
+
+                              LOVE AMONG
+                             THE CHICKENS
+
+
+                               A STORY
+                      OF THE HAPS AND MISHAPS ON
+                       AN ENGLISH CHICKEN FARM
+
+
+
+
+                          BY P. G. WODEHOUSE
+
+
+
+
+                            ILLUSTRATED BY
+
+                             ARMAND BOTH
+
+
+
+
+
+                               NEW YORK
+
+                    THE CIRCLE PUBLISHING COMPANY
+
+                                 1909
+
+
+
+
+                        _Copyright, 1908, by_
+                            A. E. BAERMAN
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+
+CHAPTER
+
+I.      --A LETTER WITH A POSTSCRIPT
+
+II.     --UKRIDGE'S SCHEME
+
+III.    --WATERLOO, SOME FELLOW-TRAVELERS, AND A GIRL WITH BROWN HAIR
+
+IV.     --THE ARRIVAL
+
+V.      --BUCKLING TO
+
+VI.     --MR. GARNET'S NARRATIVE. HAS TO DO WITH A REUNION
+
+VII.    --THE ENTENTE CORDIALE IS SEALED
+
+VIII.   --A LITTLE DINNER AT UKRIDGE'S
+
+IX.     --DIES IRAE
+
+X.      --I ENLIST THE SERVICES OF A MINION
+
+XI.     --THE BRAVE PRESERVER
+
+XII.    --SOME EMOTIONS AND YELLOW LUBIN
+
+XIII.   --TEA AND TENNIS
+
+XIV.    --A COUNCIL OF WAR
+
+XV.     --THE ARRIVAL OF NEMESIS
+
+XVI.    --A CHANCE MEETING
+
+XVII.   --OF A SENTIMENTAL NATURE
+
+XVIII.  --UKRIDGE GIVES ME ADVICE
+
+XIX.    --I ASK PAPA
+
+XX.     --SCIENTIFIC GOLF
+
+XXI.    --THE CALM BEFORE THE STORM
+
+XXII.   --THE STORM BREAKS
+
+XXIII.  --AFTER THE STORM
+
+EPILOGUE
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+
+
+
+LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
+
+
+"Never mind the ink, old horse. It'll soak in"        _Frontispiece_
+
+They had a momentary vision of an excited dog, framed in the doorway
+
+"I've only bin and drove 'im further up," said Mrs. Beale
+
+Things were not going very well on our model chicken farm
+
+"Mr. Garnet," he said, "we parted recently in anger. I hope that
+bygones will be bygones"
+
+"I did think Mr. Garnet would have fainted when the best man said, 'I
+can't find it, old horse'"
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+
+
+
+_A LETTER with a
+POSTSCRIPT_
+
+I
+
+
+Mr. Jeremy Garnet stood with his back to the empty grate--for the time
+was summer--watching with a jaundiced eye the removal of his breakfast
+things.
+
+"Mrs. Medley," he said.
+
+"Sir?"
+
+"Would it bore you if I became auto-biographical?"
+
+"Sir?"
+
+"Never mind. I merely wish to sketch for your benefit a portion of my
+life's history. At eleven o'clock last night I went to bed, and at
+once sank into a dreamless sleep. About four hours later there was a
+clattering on the stairs which shook the house like a jelly. It was
+the gentleman in the top room--I forget his name--returning to roost.
+He was humming a patriotic song. A little while later there were a
+couple of loud crashes. He had removed his boots. All this while
+snatches of the patriotic song came to me through the ceiling of my
+bedroom. At about four-thirty there was a lull, and I managed to get
+to sleep again. I wish when you see that gentleman, Mrs. Medley, you
+would give him my compliments, and ask him if he could shorten his
+program another night. He might cut out the song, for a start."
+
+"He's a very young gentleman, sir," said Mrs. Medley, in vague defense
+of her top room.
+
+"And it's highly improbable," said Garnet, "that he will ever grow
+old, if he repeats his last night's performance. I have no wish to
+shed blood wantonly, but there are moments when one must lay aside
+one's personal prejudices, and act for the good of the race. A man who
+hums patriotic songs at four o'clock in the morning doesn't seem to me
+to fit into the scheme of universal happiness. So you will mention it
+to him, won't you?"
+
+"Very well, sir," said Mrs. Medley, placidly.
+
+On the strength of the fact that he wrote for the newspapers and had
+published two novels, Mrs. Medley regarded Mr. Garnet as an eccentric
+individual who had to be humored. Whatever he did or said filled her
+with a mild amusement. She received his daily harangues in the same
+spirit as that in which a nurse listens to the outpourings of the
+family baby. She was surprised when he said anything sensible enough
+for her to understand.
+
+His table being clear of breakfast and his room free from disturbing
+influences, the exhilaration caused by his chat with his landlady
+left Mr. Garnet. Life seemed very gray to him. He was a conscientious
+young man, and he knew that he ought to sit down and do some work. On
+the other hand, his brain felt like a cauliflower, and he could not
+think what to write about. This is one of the things which sour the
+young author even more than do those long envelopes which so
+tastefully decorate his table of a morning.
+
+He felt particularly unfitted for writing at that moment. The morning
+is not the time for inventive work. An article may be polished then,
+or a half-finished story completed, but 11 A.M. is not the hour at
+which to invent.
+
+Jerry Garnet wandered restlessly about his sitting room. Rarely had it
+seemed so dull and depressing to him as it did then. The photographs
+on the mantelpiece irritated him. There was no change in them. They
+struck him as the concrete expression of monotony. His eye was caught
+by a picture hanging out of the straight. He jerked it to one side,
+and the effect became worse. He jerked it back again, and the thing
+looked as if it had been hung in a dim light by an astigmatic
+drunkard. Five minutes' pulling and hauling brought it back to a
+position only a shade less crooked than that in which he had found it,
+and by that time his restlessness had grown like a mushroom.
+
+He looked out of the window. The sunlight was playing on the house
+opposite. He looked at his boots. At this point conscience prodded him
+sharply.
+
+"I won't," he muttered fiercely, "I will work. I'll turn out
+something, even if it's the worst rot ever written."
+
+With which admirable sentiment he tracked his blotting pad to its
+hiding place (Mrs. Medley found a fresh one every day), collected ink
+and pens, and sat down.
+
+There was a distant thud from above, and shortly afterwards a thin
+tenor voice made itself heard above a vigorous splashing. The young
+gentleman on the top floor was starting another day.
+
+"Oi'll--er--sing thee saw-ongs"--brief pause, then in a triumphant
+burst, as if the singer had just remembered the name--"ovarraby."
+
+Mr. Garnet breathed a prayer and glared at the ceiling.
+
+The voice continued:
+
+"Ahnd--er--ta-ales of fa-arr Cahsh-meerer."
+
+Sudden and grewsome pause. The splashing ceased. The singer could
+hardly have been drowned in a hip bath, but Mr. Garnet hoped for the
+best.
+
+His hopes were shattered.
+
+"Come," resumed the young gentleman persuasively, "into the garden,
+Maud, for ther black batter nah-eet hath--er--florn."
+
+Jerry Garnet sprang from his seat and paced the room.
+
+"This is getting perfectly impossible," he said to himself. "I must
+get out of this. A fellow can't work in London. I'll go down to some
+farmhouse in the country. I can't think here. You might just as well
+try to work at a musical 'At Home.'"
+
+Here followed certain remarks about the young man upstairs, who was
+now, in lighter vein, putting in a spell at a popular melody from the
+Gaiety Theater.
+
+He resumed his seat and set himself resolutely to hammer out something
+which, though it might not be literature, would at least be capable of
+being printed. A search through his commonplace book brought no balm.
+A commonplace book is the author's rag bag. In it he places all the
+insane ideas that come to him, in the groundless hope that some day he
+will be able to convert them with magic touch into marketable plots.
+
+This was the luminous item which first met Mr. Garnet's eye:
+
+_Mem._ Dead body found in railway carriage under seat. Only one living
+occupant of carriage. He is suspected of being the murderer, but
+proves that he only entered carriage at twelve o'clock in the morning,
+while the body has been dead since the previous night.
+
+To this bright scheme were appended the words:
+
+This will want some working up.
+
+J. G.
+
+"It will," thought Jerry Garnet grimly, "but it will have to go on
+wanting as far as I'm concerned."
+
+The next entry he found was a perfectly inscrutable lyric outburst.
+
+    There are moments of annoyance,
+    Void of every kind of joyance,
+      In the complicated course of Man's affairs;
+    But the very worst of any
+    He experiences when he
+      Meets a young, but active, lion on the stairs.
+
+Sentiment unexceptionable. But as to the reason for the existence of
+the fragment, his mind was a blank. He shut the book impatiently. It
+was plain that no assistance was to be derived from it.
+
+His thoughts wandered back to the idea of leaving London. London might
+have suited Dr. Johnson, but he had come to the conclusion that what
+he wanted to enable him to give the public of his best (as the
+reviewer of the _Academy_, dealing with his last work, had expressed a
+polite hope that he would continue to do) was country air. A farmhouse
+by the sea somewhere ... cows ... spreading boughs ... rooks ...
+brooks ... cream. In London the day stretches before a man, if he has
+no regular and appointed work to do, like a long, white, dusty road.
+It seems impossible to get to the end of it without vast effort. But
+in the country every hour has its amusements. Up with the lark.
+Morning dip. Cheery greetings. Local color. Huge breakfast. Long
+walks. Flannels. The ungirt loin. Good, steady spell of work from
+dinner till bedtime. The prospect fascinated him. His third novel was
+already in a nebulous state in his brain. A quiet week or two in the
+country would enable him to get it into shape.
+
+He took from the pocket of his blazer a letter which had arrived some
+days before from an artist friend of his who was on a sketching tour
+in Devonshire and Somerset. There was a penciled memorandum on the
+envelope in his own handwriting:
+
+_Mem._ Might work K. L.'s story about M. and the W--s's into comic
+yarn for one of the weeklies.
+
+He gazed at this for a while, with a last hope that in it might be
+contained the germ of something which would enable him to turn out a
+morning's work; but having completely forgotten who K. L. was, and
+especially what was his (or her) story about M., whoever he (or she)
+might be, he abandoned this hope and turned to the letter in the
+envelope.
+
+The earlier portions of the letter dealt tantalizingly with the
+scenery. "Bits," come upon by accident at the end of disused lanes and
+transferred with speed to canvas, were described concisely but with
+sufficient breadth to make Garnet long to see them for himself. There
+were brief _resumes_ of dialogues between Lickford (the writer) and
+weird rustics. The whole letter breathed of the country and the open
+air. The atmosphere of Garnet's sitting room seemed to him to become
+stuffier with every sentence he read.
+
+The postscript interested him.
+
+"... By the way, at Yeovil I came across an old friend of yours.
+Stanley Featherstonhaugh Ukridge, of all people. As large as
+life--quite six foot two, and tremendously filled out. I thought he
+was abroad. The last I heard of him was that he had started for Buenos
+Ayres in a cattle-ship. It seems he has been in England sometime. I
+met him in the refreshment room at Yeovil station. I was waiting for a
+down train; he had changed on his way to town. As I opened the door I
+heard a huge voice in a more or less violent altercation, and there
+was S. F. U., in a villainous old suit of gray flannels (I'll swear it
+was the same one that he had on last time I saw him), and a
+mackintosh, though it was a blazing hot day. His pince-nez were tacked
+onto his ears with wire as usual. He greeted me with effusive shouts,
+and drew me aside. Then after a few commonplaces of greeting, he
+fumbled in his pockets, looked pained and surprised.
+
+"'Look here, Licky,' he said. 'You know I never borrow. It's against
+my principles. But I _must_ have a shilling, or I'm a ruined man. I
+seem to have had my pocket picked by some scoundrelly blackguard. Can
+you, my dear fellow, oblige me with a shilling until next Tuesday
+afternoon at three-thirty? I never borrow, so I'll tell you what I'll
+do. I'll let you have this (producing a beastly little three-penny-bit
+with a hole in it) until I can pay you back. This is of more value to
+me than I can well express, Licky, my boy. A very, very dear friend
+gave it to me when we parted, years ago. It's a wrench to part with
+it. But grim necessity ... I can hardly do it.... Still, no, no, ...
+you must take it, you must take it. Licky, old man, shake hands!
+Shake hands, my boy!'
+
+"He then asked after you, and said you were the noblest man--except
+me--on earth. I gave him your address, not being able to get out of
+it, but if I were you I should fly while there is yet time."
+
+"That," said Jerry Garnet, "is the soundest bit of advice I've heard.
+I will."
+
+"Mrs. Medley," he said, when that lady made her appearance.
+
+"Sir?"
+
+"I'm going away for a few weeks. You can let the rooms if you like.
+I'll drop you a line when I think of coming back."
+
+"Yes, sir. And your letters. Where shall I send them, sir?"
+
+"Till further notice," said Jerry Garnet, pulling out a giant
+portmanteau from a corner of the room and flinging it open, "care of
+the Dalai Lama, No. 3 Younghusband Terrace, Tibet."
+
+"Yes, sir," said Mrs. Medley placidly.
+
+"I'll write you my address to-night. I don't know where I'm going yet.
+Is that an A. B. C. over there? Good. Give my love to that bright
+young spirit on the top floor, and tell him that I hope my not being
+here to listen won't interfere in any way with his morning popular
+concerts."
+
+"Yes, sir."
+
+"And, Mrs. Medley, if a man named ----"
+
+Mrs. Medley had drifted silently away. During his last speech a
+thunderous knocking had begun on the front door.
+
+Jerry Garnet stood and listened, transfixed. Something seemed to tell
+him who was at the business end of that knocker.
+
+He heard Mrs. Medley's footsteps pass along the hall and pause at the
+door. Then there was the click of the latch. Then a volume of sound
+rushed up to him where he stood over his empty portmanteau.
+
+"Is Mr. Garnet in?"
+
+Mrs. Medley's reply was inaudible, but apparently in the affirmative.
+
+"Where is he?" boomed the voice. "Show me the old horse. First floor.
+Thank you. Where is the man of wrath?"
+
+There followed a crashing on the stairs such as even the young
+gentleman of the top floor had been unable to produce in his nocturnal
+rovings. The house shook.
+
+And with the tramping came the thunderous voice, as the visitor once
+more gave tongue.
+
+"Garnet! GARNET!! GARNET!!!"
+
+
+
+
+UKRIDGE'S SCHEME
+
+II
+
+
+Mr. Stanley Featherstonhaugh Ukridge dashed into the room, uttering a
+roar of welcome as he caught sight of Garnet, still standing petrified
+athwart his portmanteau.
+
+"My dear old man," he shouted, springing at him and seizing his hand
+in a clutch that effectually woke Garnet from his stupor. "How _are_
+you, old chap? This is good. By Jove, this is good! This is fine,
+what?"
+
+He dashed back to the door and looked out.
+
+"Come on, Millie," he shouted.
+
+Garnet was wondering who in the name of fortune Millie could possibly
+be, when there appeared on the further side of Mr. Ukridge the figure
+of a young woman. She paused in the doorway, and smiled pleasantly.
+
+"Garnet, old horse," said Ukridge with some pride, "let me introduce
+you to my wife. Millie, this is old Garnet. You've heard me talk about
+him."
+
+"Oh, yes," said Mrs. Ukridge.
+
+Garnet bowed awkwardly. The idea of Ukridge married was something too
+overpowering to be assimilated on the instant. If ever there was a man
+designed by nature to be a bachelor, Stanley Ukridge was that man.
+Garnet could feel that he himself was not looking his best. He knew in
+a vague, impersonal way that his eyebrows were still somewhere in the
+middle of his forehead, whither they had sprung in the first moment of
+surprise, and that his jaw, which had dropped, had not yet resumed
+its normal posture. Before committing himself to speech he made a
+determined effort to revise his facial expression.
+
+"Buck up, old horse," said Ukridge. He had a painful habit of
+addressing all and sundry by that title. In his school-master days he
+had made use of it while interviewing the parents of new pupils, and
+the latter had gone away, as a rule, with a feeling that this must be
+either the easy manner of genius or spirits, and hoping for the best.
+Later, he had used it to perfect strangers in the streets. On one
+occasion he had been heard to address a bishop by that title.
+
+"Surprised to find me married, what? Garny, old boy"--sinking his
+voice to what was intended to be a whisper--"take my tip. You go and
+do the same. You feel another man. Give up this bachelor business.
+It's a mug's game. Go and get married, my boy, go and get married. By
+gad, I've forgotten to pay the cabby. Half a moment."
+
+He was out of the door and on his way downstairs before the echoes of
+his last remark had ceased to shake the window of the sitting room.
+Garnet was left to entertain Mrs. Ukridge.
+
+So far her share in the conversation had been small. Nobody talked
+very much when Ukridge was on the scene. She sat on the edge of
+Garnet's big basket chair, looking very small and quiet. She smiled
+pleasantly, as she had done during the whole of the preceding
+dialogue. It was apparently her chief form of expression.
+
+Jerry Garnet felt very friendly toward her. He could not help pitying
+her. Ukridge, he thought, was a very good person to know casually, but
+a little of him, as his former headmaster had once said in a moody,
+reflective voice, went a very long way. To be bound to him for life
+was not the ideal state for a girl. If he had been a girl, he felt,
+he would as soon have married a volcano.
+
+"And she's so young," he thought, as he looked across at the basket
+chair. "Quite a kid."
+
+"You and Stanley have known each other a long time, haven't you?" said
+the object of his pity, breaking the silence.
+
+"Yes. Oh, yes," said Garnet. "Several years. We were masters at the
+same school together."
+
+Mrs. Ukridge leaned forward with round, shining eyes.
+
+"Isn't he a _wonderful_ man, Mr. Garnet!" she said ecstatically.
+
+Not yet, to judge from her expression and the tone of her voice, had
+she had experience of the disadvantages attached to the position of
+Mrs. Stanley Ukridge.
+
+Garnet could agree with her there.
+
+"Yes, he is certainly wonderful," he said.
+
+"I believe he could do anything."
+
+"Yes," said Garnet. He believed that Ukridge was at least capable of
+anything.
+
+"He has done so many things. Have you ever kept fowls?" she broke off
+with apparent irrelevance.
+
+"No," said Garnet. "You see, I spend so much of my time in town. I
+should find it difficult."
+
+Mrs. Ukridge looked disappointed.
+
+"I was hoping you might have had some experience. Stanley, of course,
+can turn his hand to anything, but I think experience is such a good
+thing, don't you?"
+
+"It is," said Garnet, mystified. "But--"
+
+"I have bought a shilling book called 'Fowls and All About Them,' but
+it is very hard to understand. You see, we--but here is Stanley. He
+will explain it all."
+
+"Well, Garnet, old horse," said Ukridge, reentering the room after
+another energetic passage of the stairs, "settle down and let's talk
+business. Found cabby gibbering on doorstep. Wouldn't believe I didn't
+want to bilk him. Had to give him an extra shilling. But now, about
+business. Lucky to find you in, because I've got a scheme for you,
+Garny, old boy. Yes, sir, the idea of a thousand years. Now listen to
+me for a moment."
+
+He sat down on the table and dragged a chair up as a leg rest. Then he
+took off his pince-nez, wiped them, readjusted the wire behind his
+ears, and, having hit a brown patch on the knee of his gray flannel
+trousers several times in the apparent hope of removing it, began to
+speak.
+
+"About fowls," he said.
+
+"What about them?" asked Garnet. The subject was beginning to interest
+him. It showed a curious tendency to creep into the conversation.
+
+"I want you to give me your undivided attention for a moment," said
+Ukridge. "I was saying to my wife only the other day: 'Garnet's the
+man. Clever man, Garnet. Full of ideas.' Didn't I, Millie?"
+
+"Yes, dear," said Mrs. Ukridge, smiling.
+
+"Well?" said Garnet.
+
+"The fact is," said Ukridge, with a Micawber-like burst of candor, "we
+are going to keep fowls."
+
+He stopped and looked at Garnet in order to see the effect of the
+information. Garnet bore it with fortitude.
+
+"Yes?" he said.
+
+Ukridge shifted himself farther on to the table and upset the inkpot.
+
+"Never mind," he said, "it'll soak in. Don't you worry about that, you
+keep listening to me. When I said we meant to keep fowls, I didn't
+mean in a small sort of way--two cocks and a couple of hens and a
+ping-pong ball for a nest egg. We are going to do it on a large scale.
+We are going to keep," he concluded impressively, "a chicken farm!"
+
+"A chicken farm," echoed Mrs. Ukridge with an affectionate and
+admiring glance at her husband.
+
+"Ah," said Garnet, who felt his responsibilities as chorus.
+
+"I've thought it all out," continued Ukridge, "and it's as clear as
+mud. No expenses, large profits, quick returns. Chickens, eggs, and no
+work. By Jove, old man, it's the idea of a lifetime. Just listen to me
+for a moment. You buy your hen--"
+
+"One hen?" inquired Garnet.
+
+"Call it one for the sake of argument. It makes my calculations
+clearer. Very well, then. You buy your hen. It lays an egg every day
+of the week. You sell the eggs--say--six for fivepence. Keep of hen
+costs nothing. Profit at least fourpence, three farthings on every
+half-dozen eggs. What do you think of that, Bartholomew?"
+
+Garnet admitted that it sounded like an attractive scheme, but
+expressed a wish to overhaul the figures in case of error.
+
+"Error!" shouted Ukridge, pounding the table with such energy that it
+groaned beneath him. "Error? Not a bit of it. Can't you follow a
+simple calculation like that? The thing is, you see, you get your
+original hen for next to nothing. That's to say, on tick. Anybody will
+let you have a hen on tick. Now listen to me for a moment. You let
+your hen set, and hatch chickens. Suppose you have a dozen hens. Very
+well, then. When each of the dozen has a dozen chickens, you send the
+old hens back with thanks for the kind loan, and there you are,
+starting business with a hundred and forty-four free chickens to your
+name. And after a bit, when the chickens grow up and begin to lay, all
+you have to do is to sit back in your chair and gather in the big
+checks. Isn't that so, Millie?"
+
+"Yes, dear," said Mrs. Ukridge with shining eyes.
+
+"We've fixed it all up. Do you know Lyme Regis, in Dorsetshire? On the
+borders of Devon. Quiet little fishing village. Bathing. Sea air.
+Splendid scenery. Just the place for a chicken farm. I've been looking
+after that. A friend of my wife's has lent us a jolly old house with
+large grounds. All we've got to do is to get in the fowls. That's all
+right. I've ordered the first lot. We shall find them waiting for us
+when we arrive."
+
+"Well," said Garnet, "I'm sure I wish you luck. Mind you let me know
+how you get on."
+
+"Let you know!" roared Ukridge. "Why, old horse, you've got to come,
+too. We shall take no refusal. Shall we, Millie?"
+
+"No, dear," murmured Mrs. Ukridge.
+
+"Of course not," said Ukridge. "No refusal of any sort. Pack up
+to-night, and meet us at Waterloo to-morrow."
+
+"It's awfully good of you--" began Garnet a little blankly.
+
+"Not a bit of it, not a bit of it. This is pure business. I was saying
+to my wife when we came in that you were the very man for us. 'If old
+Garnet's in town,' I said, 'we'll have him. A man with his flow of
+ideas will be invaluable on a chicken farm.' Didn't I, Millie?"
+
+Mrs. Ukridge murmured the response.
+
+"You see, I'm one of these practical men. I go straight ahead,
+following my nose. What you want in a business of this sort is a touch
+of the dreamer to help out the practical mind. We look to you for
+suggestions, Montmorency. Timely suggestions with respect to the
+comfort and upbringing of the fowls. And you can work. I've seen you.
+Of course you take your share of the profits. That's understood. Yes,
+yes, I must insist. Strict business between friends. We must arrange
+it all when we get down there. My wife is the secretary of the firm.
+She has been writing letters to people, asking for fowls. So you see
+it's a thoroughly organized concern. There's money in it, old horse.
+Don't you forget that."
+
+"We should be so disappointed if you did not come," said Mrs. Ukridge,
+lifting her childlike eyes to Garnet's face.
+
+Garnet stood against the mantelpiece and pondered. In after years he
+recognized that that moment marked an epoch in his life. If he had
+refused the invitation, he would not have--but, to quote the old
+novelists, we anticipate. At any rate, he would have missed a
+remarkable experience. It is not given to everyone to see Mr. Stanley
+Ukridge manage a chicken farm.
+
+"The fact is," he said at last, "I was thinking of going somewhere
+where I could get some golf."
+
+Ukridge leaped on the table triumphantly.
+
+"Lyme Regis is just the place for you, then. Perfect hotbed of golf.
+Fine links at the top of the hill, not half a mile from the farm.
+Bring your clubs. You'll be able to have a round or two in the
+afternoons. Get through serious work by lunch time."
+
+"You know," said Garnet, "I am absolutely inexperienced as regards
+fowls."
+
+"Excellent!" said Ukridge. "Then you're just the man. You will bring
+to the work a mind entirely unclouded by theories. You will act solely
+by the light of your intelligence."
+
+"Er--yes," said Garnet.
+
+"I wouldn't have a professional chicken farmer about the place if he
+paid to come. Natural intelligence is what we want. Then we can rely
+on you?"
+
+"Very well," said Garnet slowly. "It's very kind of you to ask me."
+
+"It's business, Cuthbert, business. Very well, then. We shall catch
+the eleven-twenty at Waterloo. Don't miss it. You book to Axminster.
+Look out for me on the platform. If I see you first, I'll shout."
+
+Garnet felt that that promise rang true.
+
+"Then good-by for the present. Millie, we must be off. Till to-morrow,
+Garnet."
+
+"Good-by, Mr. Garnet," said Mrs. Ukridge.
+
+Looking back at the affair after the lapse of years, Garnet was
+accustomed to come to the conclusion that she was the one pathetic
+figure in the farce. Under what circumstances she had married Ukridge
+he did not learn till later. He was also uncertain whether at any
+moment in her career she regretted it. But it was certainly pathetic
+to witness her growing bewilderment during the weeks that followed, as
+the working of Ukridge's giant mind was unfolded to her little by
+little. Life, as Ukridge understood the word, must have struck her as
+a shade too full of incident to be really comfortable. Garnet was wont
+to console himself by the hope that her very genuine love for her
+husband, and his equally genuine love for her, was sufficient to
+smooth out the rough places of life.
+
+As he returned to his room, after showing his visitors to the door,
+the young man upstairs, who had apparently just finished breakfast,
+burst once more into song:
+
+    "We'll never come back no more, boys,
+      We'll never come back no more."
+
+Garnet could hear him wedding appropriate dance to the music.
+
+"Not for a few weeks, at any rate," he said to himself, as he started
+his packing at the point where he had left off.
+
+
+
+
+A GIRL WITH BROWN HAIR
+
+III
+
+
+Waterloo station is one of the things which no fellow can understand.
+Thousands come to it, thousands go from it. Porters grow gray-headed
+beneath its roof. Buns, once fresh and tender, become hard and
+misanthropic in its refreshment rooms, and look as if they had seen
+the littleness of existence and were disillusioned. But there the
+station stands, year after year, wrapped in a discreet gloom, always
+the same, always baffling and inscrutable. Not even the porters
+understand it. "I couldn't say, sir," is the civil but unsatisfying
+reply with which research is met. Now and then one, more gifted than
+his colleagues, will inform the traveler that his train starts from
+"No. 3 or No. 7," but a moment's reflection and he hedges with No. 12.
+
+Waterloo is the home of imperfect knowledge. The booking clerks cannot
+state in a few words where tickets may be bought for any station. They
+are only certain that they themselves cannot sell them.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The gloom of the station was lightened on the following morning at ten
+minutes to eleven when Mr. Garnet arrived to catch the train to
+Axminster, by several gleams of sunshine and a great deal of bustle
+and movement on the various platforms. A cheery activity pervaded the
+place. Porters on every hand were giving their celebrated imitations
+of the car of Juggernaut, throwing as a sop to the wounded a crisp "by
+your leave." Agitated ladies were pouring forth questions with the
+rapidity of machine guns. Long queues surged at the mouths of the
+booking offices, inside which soured clerks, sending lost sheep empty
+away, were learning once more their lesson of the innate folly of
+mankind. Other crowds collected at the bookstalls, and the bookstall
+keeper was eying with dislike men who were under the impression that
+they were in a free library.
+
+An optimistic porter had relieved Garnet of his portmanteau and golf
+clubs as he stepped out of his cab, and had arranged to meet him on
+No. 6 platform, from which, he asserted, with the quiet confidence
+which has made Englishmen what they are, the eleven-twenty would start
+on its journey to Axminster. Unless, he added, it went from No. 4.
+
+Garnet, having bought a ticket, after drawing blank at two booking
+offices, made his way to the bookstall. Here he inquired, in a loud,
+penetrating voice, if they had got "Mr. Jeremy Garnet's last novel,
+'The Maneuvers of Arthur.'" Being informed that they had not, he
+clicked his tongue cynically, advised the man in charge to order that
+work, as the demand for it might be expected shortly to be large, and
+spent a shilling on a magazine and some weekly papers. Then, with ten
+minutes to spare, he went off in search of Ukridge.
+
+He found him on platform No. 6. The porter's first choice was, it
+seemed, correct. The eleven-twenty was already alongside the platform,
+and presently Garnet observed his porter cleaving a path toward him
+with the portmanteau and golf clubs.
+
+"Here you are!" shouted Ukridge. "Good for you. Thought you were going
+to miss it."
+
+Garnet shook hands with the smiling Mrs. Ukridge.
+
+"I've got a carriage," said Ukridge, "and collared two corner seats.
+My wife goes down in another. She dislikes the smell of smoke when
+she's traveling. Let's pray that we get the carriage to ourselves. But
+all London seems to be here this morning. Get in, old horse. I'll just
+see her ladyship into her carriage and come back to you."
+
+Garnet entered the compartment, and stood at the door, looking out in
+order, after the friendly manner of the traveling Briton, to thwart an
+invasion of fellow-travelers. Then he withdrew his head suddenly and
+sat down. An elderly gentleman, accompanied by a girl, was coming
+toward him. It was not this type of fellow-traveler whom he hoped to
+keep out. He had noticed the girl at the booking office. She had
+waited by the side of the line, while the elderly gentleman struggled
+gamely for the tickets, and he had plenty of opportunity of observing
+her appearance. For five minutes he had debated with himself as to
+whether her hair should rightly be described as brown or golden. He
+had decided finally on brown. It then became imperative that he should
+ascertain the color of her eyes. Once only had he met them, and then
+only for a second. They might be blue. They might be gray. He could
+not be certain. The elderly gentleman came to the door of the
+compartment and looked in.
+
+"This seems tolerably empty, my dear Phyllis," he said.
+
+Garnet, his glance fixed on his magazine, made a note of the name. It
+harmonized admirably with the hair and the eyes of elusive color.
+
+"You are sure you do not object to a smoking carriage, my dear?"
+
+"Oh, no, father. Not at all."
+
+Garnet told himself that the voice was just the right sort of voice to
+go with the hair, the eyes, and the name.
+
+"Then I think--" said the elderly gentleman, getting in. The
+inflection of his voice suggested the Irishman. It was not a brogue.
+There were no strange words. But the general effect was Irish. Garnet
+congratulated himself. Irishmen are generally good company. An
+Irishman with a pretty daughter should be unusually good company.
+
+The bustle on the platform had increased momently, until now, when,
+from the snorting of the engine, it seemed likely that the train might
+start at any minute, the crowd's excitement was extreme. Shrill cries
+echoed down the platform. Lost sheep, singly and in companies, rushed
+to and fro, peering eagerly into carriages in the search for seats.
+Piercing cries ordered unknown "Tommies" and "Ernies" to "keep by
+aunty, now." Just as Ukridge returned, the dreaded "Get in anywhere"
+began to be heard, and the next moment an avalanche of warm humanity
+poured into the carriage. A silent but bitter curse framed itself on
+Garnet's lips. His chance of pleasant conversation with the lady of
+the brown hair and the eyes that were either gray or blue was at an
+end.
+
+The newcomers consisted of a middle-aged lady, addressed as aunty; a
+youth called Albert, subsequently described by Garnet as the rudest
+boy on earth--a proud title, honestly won; lastly, a niece of some
+twenty years, stolid and seemingly without interest in life.
+
+Ukridge slipped into his corner, adroitly foiling Albert, who had made
+a dive in that direction. Albert regarded him fixedly for a space,
+then sank into the seat beside Garnet and began to chew something
+grewsome that smelled of aniseed.
+
+Aunty, meanwhile, was distributing her weight evenly between the toes
+of the Irish gentleman and those of his daughter, as she leaned out of
+the window to converse with a lady friend in a straw hat and hair
+curlers. Phyllis, he noticed, was bearing it with angelic calm. Her
+profile, when he caught sight of it round aunty, struck him as a
+little cold, even haughty. That, however, might be due to what she was
+suffering. It is unfair to judge a lady's character from her face, at
+a moment when she is in a position of physical discomfort. The train
+moved off with a jerk in the middle of a request on the part of the
+straw-hatted lady that her friend would "remember that, you know,
+about _him_," and aunty, staggering back, sat down on a bag of food
+which Albert had placed on the seat beside him.
+
+"Clumsy!" observed Albert tersely.
+
+"Al_bert_, you mustn't speak to aunty so."
+
+"Wodyer want sit on my bag for, then?" inquired Albert.
+
+They argued the point.
+
+Garnet, who should have been busy studying character for a novel of
+the lower classes, took up his magazine and began to read. The odor of
+aniseed became more and more painful. Ukridge had lighted a cigar, and
+Garnet understood why Mrs. Ukridge preferred to travel in another
+compartment. For "in his hand he bore the brand which none but he
+might smoke."
+
+Garnet looked stealthily across the carriage to see how his lady of
+the hair and eyes was enduring this combination of evils, and noticed
+that she, too, had begun to read. And as she put down the book to look
+out of the window at the last view of London, he saw with a thrill
+that it was "The Maneuvers of Arthur." Never before had he come upon a
+stranger reading his work. And if "The Maneuvers of Arthur" could make
+the reader oblivious to surroundings such as these, then, felt Garnet,
+it was no common book--a fact which he had long since suspected.
+
+The train raced on toward the sea. It was a warm day, and a torpid
+peace began to settle down on the carriage.
+
+Soon only Garnet, the Irishman, and the lady were awake.
+
+"What's your book, me dear?" asked the Irishman.
+
+"'The Maneuvers of Arthur,' father," said Phyllis. "By Jeremy Garnet."
+
+Garnet would not have believed without the evidence of his ears that
+his name could possibly have sounded so well.
+
+"Dolly Strange gave it to me when I left the abbey," continued
+Phyllis. "She keeps a shelf of books for her guests when they are
+going away. Books that she considers rubbish and doesn't want, you
+know."
+
+Garnet hated Dolly Strange without further evidence.
+
+"And what do you think of it, me dear?"
+
+"I like it," said Phyllis decidedly. The carriage swam before
+Garnet's eyes. "I think it is very clever. I shall keep it."
+
+"Bless you," thought Garnet, "and I will write my precious autograph
+on every page, if you want it."
+
+"I wonder who Jeremy Garnet is?" said Phyllis. "I imagine him rather
+an old young man, probably with an eyeglass and conceited. He must be
+conceited. I can tell that from the style. And I should think he
+didn't know many girls. At least, if he thinks Pamela Grant an
+ordinary sort of girl."
+
+"Is she not?" asked her father.
+
+"She's a cr-r-reature," said Phyllis emphatically.
+
+This was a blow to Garnet, and demolished the self-satisfaction which
+her earlier criticisms had caused to grow within him. He had always
+looked on Pamela as something very much out of the ordinary run of
+feminine character studies. That scene between her and the curate in
+the conservatory.... And when she finds Arthur at the meet of the
+Blankshire.... He was sorry she did not like Pamela. Somehow it
+lowered Pamela in his estimation.
+
+"But I like Arthur," said Phyllis, and she smiled--the first time
+Garnet had seen her do so.
+
+Garnet also smiled to himself. Arthur was the hero. He was a young
+writer. Ergo, Arthur was himself.
+
+The train was beginning to slow down. Signs of returning animation
+began to be noticeable among the sleepers. A whistle from the engine,
+and the train drew up in a station. Looking out of the window, Garnet
+saw that it was Yeovil. There was a general exodus. Aunty became
+instantly a thing of dash and electricity, collected parcels, shook
+Albert, replied to his thrusts with repartee, and finally headed a
+stampede out of the door.
+
+To Garnet's chagrin the Irish gentleman and his daughter also rose.
+Apparently this was to be the end of their brief acquaintanceship.
+They alighted and walked down the platform.
+
+"Where are we?" said Ukridge sleepily, opening his eyes. "Yeovil? Not
+far now, old horse."
+
+With which remark he closed his eyes again and returned to his
+slumbers.
+
+Garnet's eye, roving disconsolately over the carriage, was caught by
+something lying in the far corner. It was the criticized "Maneuvers of
+Arthur." The girl had left it behind.
+
+What follows shows the vanity that obsesses our young and rising
+authors. It did not enter into his mind that the book might have been
+left behind of set purpose, as being of no further use to the owner.
+It only occurred to him that if he did not act swiftly the lady of the
+hair and eyes would suffer a loss beside which the loss of a purse or
+a hand bag were trivial.
+
+He acted swiftly.
+
+Five seconds later he was at the end of the platform, flushed but
+courteous.
+
+"Excuse me," he said, "I think--"
+
+"Thank you," said the girl.
+
+Garnet made his way back to his carriage.
+
+"They are blue," he said.
+
+
+
+
+THE ARRIVAL
+
+IV
+
+
+From Axminster to Lyme Regis the line runs through country as pretty
+as any that can be found in the island, and the train, as if in
+appreciation of this fact, does not hurry over the journey. It was
+late afternoon by the time the chicken farmers reached their
+destination.
+
+The arrangements for the carrying of luggage at Lyme Regis border on
+the primitive. Boxes are left on the platform, and later, when he
+thinks of it, a carrier looks in and conveys them down into the valley
+and up the hill on the opposite side to the address written on the
+labels. The owner walks. Lyme Regis is not a place for the halt and
+maimed.
+
+Ukridge led his band in the direction of the farm, which lay across
+the valley, looking through woods to the sea. The place was visible
+from the station, from which, indeed, standing as it did on the top of
+a hill, the view was extensive.
+
+Halfway up the slope on the other side of the valley the party left
+the road and made their way across a spongy field, Ukridge explaining
+that this was a short cut. They climbed through a hedge, crossed a
+stream and another field, and after negotiating a difficult bank
+topped with barbed wire, found themselves in a kitchen garden.
+
+Ukridge mopped his forehead and restored his pince-nez to their
+original position, from which the passage of the barbed wire had
+dislodged them.
+
+"This is the place," he said. "We have come in by the back way. It
+saves time. Tired, Millie?"
+
+"No, dear, thank you."
+
+"Without being tired," said Garnet, "I am distinctly ready for tea.
+What are the prospects?"
+
+"That'll be all right," said Ukridge, "don't you worry. A most
+competent man, of the name of Beale, and his wife are in charge at
+present. I wrote to them telling them that we were coming to-day. They
+will be ready for us."
+
+They were at the front door by this time. Ukridge rang the bell. The
+noise reechoed through the house, but there were no answering
+footsteps. He rang again. There is no mistaking the note of a bell in
+an empty house. It was plain that the most competent man and his wife
+were out.
+
+"Now what are you going to do?" said Garnet.
+
+Mrs. Ukridge looked at her husband with quiet confidence.
+
+Ukridge fell back on reminiscence.
+
+"This," he said, leaning against the door and endeavoring to button
+his collar at the back, "reminds me of an afternoon in the Argentine.
+Two other men and myself tried for three quarters of an hour to get
+into an empty house, where there looked as if there might be something
+to eat, and we'd just got the door open when the owner turned up from
+behind a tree with a shotgun. It was a little difficult to explain.
+There was a dog, too. We were glad to say good-by."
+
+At this moment history partially repeated itself. From the other side
+of the door came a dissatisfied whine, followed by a short bark.
+
+"Halloo," said Ukridge, "Beale has a dog."
+
+"And the dog," said Garnet, "will have us if we're not careful. What
+are you going to do?"
+
+"Let's try the back," said Ukridge. "We must get in. What right," he
+added with pathos, "has a beastly mongrel belonging to a man I employ
+to keep me out of my own house? It's a little hard. Here am I, slaving
+to support Beale, and when I try to get into my house, his infernal
+dog barks at me. But we will try kindness first. Let me get to the
+keyhole. I will parley with the animal."
+
+He put his mouth to the keyhole and roared the soothing words "Goo'
+dog!" through it. Instantly the door shook as some heavy object hurled
+itself against it. The barking rang through the house.
+
+"Kindness seems to be a drug in the market," said Garnet. "Do you see
+your way to trying a little force?"
+
+"I'll tell you what we'll do," said Ukridge, rising. "We'll go round
+and get in at the kitchen window."
+
+"And how long are we to stay there? Till the dog dies?"
+
+"I never saw such a man as you," protested Ukridge. "You have a
+perfect mania for looking on the dark side. The dog won't guard the
+kitchen door. We shall manage to shut him up somewhere."
+
+"Oh," said Garnet.
+
+"And now let's get in and have something to eat, for goodness' sake."
+
+The kitchen window proved to be insecurely latched. Ukridge flung it
+open and they climbed in.
+
+The dog, hearing the sound of voices, raced back along the passage and
+flung himself at the door. He then proceeded to scratch at the panels
+in the persevering way of one who feels that he is engaged upon a
+business at which he is a specialist.
+
+Inside the kitchen, Ukridge took command.
+
+"Never mind the dog," he said, "let it scratch."
+
+"I thought," said Garnet, "we were going to shut it up somewhere?"
+
+"Go out and shut it into the dining room, then. Personally, I mean to
+have some tea. Millie, you know how to light a fire. Garnet and I will
+be collecting cups and things. When that scoundrel Beale arrives, I
+shall tear him limb from limb. Deserting us like this! The man must be
+a thorough fraud. He told me he was an old soldier. If this was the
+sort of discipline they used to keep in his regiment, I don't wonder
+that the service is going to the dogs. There goes a plate! How is the
+fire getting on, Millie? I'll chop Beale into little bits. What's that
+you've got there, Garny, old horse? Tea? Good! Where's the bread?
+There! Another plate. Look here, I'll give that dog three minutes, and
+if it doesn't stop scratching that door by then, I'll take the bread
+knife and go out and have a soul-to-soul talk with it. It's a little
+hard. My own house, and the first thing I find in it when I arrive is
+somebody else's beastly dog scratching holes in the doors. Stop it,
+you beast!"
+
+The dog's reply was to continue his operations _piu mosso_.
+
+Ukridge's eyes gleamed behind their glasses.
+
+"Give me a good large jug," he said with ominous calm.
+
+He took the largest of the jugs from the dresser and strode with it
+into the scullery, whence came the sound of running water. He returned
+carrying the jug in both hands. His mien was that of a general who
+sees his way to a master stroke of strategy.
+
+"Garny, old horse," he said, "tack on to the handle, and when I give
+the word fling wide the gates. Then watch that beast beyond the door
+get the surprise of its lifetime."
+
+Garnet attached himself to the handle as directed. Ukridge gave the
+word. They had a momentary vision of an excited dog of the mongrel
+class framed in the open doorway, all eyes and teeth; then the passage
+was occupied by a spreading pool, and indignant barks from the
+distance told that the mongrel was thinking the thing over in some
+safe retreat.
+
+"Settled _his_ hash," said Ukridge complacently. "Nothing like
+resource, Garnet, my boy. Some men would have gone on letting a good
+door be ruined."
+
+"And spoiled the dog for a ha-porth of water," said Garnet. "I suppose
+we shall have to clean up that mess some time."
+
+"There you go," said Ukridge, "looking on the dark side. Be an
+optimist, my boy, be an optimist. Beale and Mrs. Beale shall clean
+that passage as a penance. How is the fire, Millie?"
+
+"The kettle is just boiling, dear."
+
+Over a cup of tea Ukridge became the man of business.
+
+[Illustration: They had a momentary vision of an excited dog, framed
+in the doorway.]
+
+"I wonder when those fowls are going to arrive. They should have been
+here to-day. If they don't come to-morrow, I shall lodge a complaint.
+There must be no slackness. They must bustle about. After tea I'll
+show you the garden, and we will choose a place for a fowl run.
+To-morrow we must buckle to. Serious work will begin immediately after
+breakfast."
+
+"Suppose," said Garnet, "the fowls arrive before we are ready for
+them?"
+
+"Why, then, they must wait."
+
+"But you can't keep fowls cooped up indefinitely in a crate. I suppose
+they will come in a crate. I don't know much about these things."
+
+"Oh, that'll be all right. There's a basement to this house. We'll let
+'em run about there till we're ready for them. There's always a way of
+doing things if you look for it."
+
+"I hope you are going to let the hens hatch some of the eggs,
+Stanley, dear," said Mrs. Ukridge. "I should so love to have some dear
+little chickens."
+
+"Of course," said Ukridge. "My idea was this: These people will send
+us fifty fowls of sorts. That means--call it forty eggs a day. Let 'em
+hatch out thirty a day, and we will use the other ten for the table.
+We shall want at least ten. Well, I'm hanged, that dog again! Where's
+that jug?"
+
+But this time an unforeseen interruption prevented the maneuver from
+being the success it had been before. Garnet had turned the handle,
+and was just about to pull the door open, while Ukridge, looking like
+some modern and dilapidated version of Discobolus, stood beside him
+with his jug poised, when a hoarse voice spoke from the window.
+
+"Stand still!" said the voice, "or I'll corpse you."
+
+Garnet dropped the handle, Ukridge dropped the jug, Mrs. Ukridge
+screamed.
+
+At the window, with a double-barreled gun in his hands, stood a short,
+square, red-headed man. The muzzle of his gun, which rested on the
+sill, was pointing in a straight line at the third button of Garnet's
+waistcoat. With a distant recollection of the Deadwood Dick literature
+of his childhood, Garnet flung both hands above his head.
+
+Ukridge emitted a roar like that of a hungry lion.
+
+"Beale!" he shouted. "You scoundrelly, unprincipled blackguard! What
+are you doing with that gun? Why were you out? What have you been
+doing? Why did you shout like that? Look what you've made me do."
+
+He pointed to the floor. Broken crockery, spreading water, his own
+shoes--exceedingly old tennis shoes--well soaked, attested the fact
+that damage had been done.
+
+"Lor'! Mr. Ukridge, sir, is that you?" said the red-headed man calmly.
+"I thought you was burglars."
+
+A sharp bark from the other side of the kitchen door, followed by a
+renewal of the scratching, drew Mr. Beale's attention to his faithful
+hound.
+
+"That's Bob," he said.
+
+"I don't know what you call the brute," said Ukridge. "Come in and tie
+him up."
+
+"'Ow am I to get in, Mr. Ukridge, sir?"
+
+"Come in through the window, and mind what you're doing with that gun.
+After you've finished with the dog, I should like a brief chat with
+you, if you can spare the time and have no other engagements."
+
+Mr. Beale, having carefully deposited his gun against the wall of the
+kitchen, and dropped a pair of very limp rabbits with a thud to the
+floor, proceeded to climb through the window. This operation
+performed, he stood on one side while the besieged garrison passed out
+by the same road.
+
+"You will find me in the garden, Beale," said Ukridge. "I have one or
+two little things to say to you."
+
+Mr. Beale grinned affably.
+
+The cool air of the garden was grateful after the warmth of the
+kitchen. It was a pretty garden, or would have been, if it had not
+been so neglected. Garnet seemed to see himself sitting in a deck
+chair on the lawn, looking through the leaves of the trees at the
+harbor below. It was a spot, he felt, in which it would be an easy and
+pleasant task to shape the plot of his novel. He was glad he had come.
+About now, outside his lodgings in town, a particularly lethal barrel
+organ would be striking up the latest revolting air with which the
+halls had inflicted London.
+
+"Here you are, Beale," said Ukridge, as the red-headed man approached.
+"Now, then, what have you to say?"
+
+The hired man looked thoughtful for a while, then observed that it was
+a fine evening. Garnet felt that he was begging the question. He was a
+strong, healthy man, and should have scorned to beg.
+
+"Fine evening?" shouted Ukridge. "What--on--earth has that got to do
+with it? I want to know why you and Mrs. Beale were both out when we
+arrived?"
+
+"The missus went to Axminster, Mr. Ukridge, sir."
+
+"She had no right to go to Axminster. I don't pay her large sums to go
+to Axminster. You knew I was coming this evening."
+
+"No, Mr. Ukridge, sir."
+
+"You didn't!"
+
+"No, Mr. Ukridge, sir."
+
+"Beale," said Ukridge with studied calm, "one of us two is a fool."
+
+"I noticed that, sir."
+
+"Let us sift this matter to the bottom. You got my letter?"
+
+"No, Mr. Ukridge, sir."
+
+"My letter saying that I should arrive to-night. You did not get it?"
+
+"No, sir."
+
+"Now look here, Beale," said Ukridge, "I am certain that that letter
+was posted. I remember placing it in my pocket for that purpose. It is
+not there now. See. These are all the contents of my--well, I'm
+hanged!"
+
+He stood looking at the envelope he had produced from his breast
+pocket. Mr. Beale coughed.
+
+"Beale," said Ukridge, "you--er--there seems to have been a mistake."
+
+"Yes, sir."
+
+"You are not so much to blame as I thought."
+
+"No, sir."
+
+"Anyhow," said Ukridge, in inspired tones, "I'll go and slay that
+infernal dog. Where's your gun, Beale?"
+
+But better counsels prevailed, and the proceedings closed with a cold
+but pleasant little dinner, at which the spared mongrel came out
+unexpectedly strong with brainy and diverting tricks.
+
+
+
+
+BUCKLING TO
+
+V
+
+
+Sunshine, streaming into his bedroom through the open window, woke
+Garnet next day as distant clocks were striking eight. It was a lovely
+morning, cool and fresh. The grass of the lawn, wet with dew, sparkled
+in the sun. A thrush, who knew all about early birds and their
+perquisites, was filling in the time before the arrival of the worm
+with a song or two as he sat in the bushes. In the ivy a colony of
+sparrows were opening the day well with a little brisk fighting. On
+the gravel in front of the house lay the mongrel Bob, blinking lazily.
+
+The gleam of the sea through the trees turned Garnet's thoughts to
+bathing. He dressed quickly and went out. Bob rose to meet him,
+waving an absurdly long tail. The hatchet was definitely buried now.
+That little matter of the jug of water was forgotten.
+
+"Well, Bob," said Garnet, "coming down to watch me bathe?"
+
+Bob uttered a bark of approval and ran before him to the gate.
+
+A walk of five minutes brought Garnet to the sleepy little town. He
+passed through the narrow street, and turned on to the beach, walking
+in the direction of the cob, that combination of pier and breakwater
+which the misadventures of one of Jane Austen's young misses have made
+known to the outside public.
+
+The tide was high, and Garnet, leaving his clothes to the care of Bob,
+dived into twelve feet of clear, cold water. As he swam he compared it
+with the morning tub of town, and felt that he had done well to come
+with Ukridge to this pleasant spot. But he could not rely on unbroken
+calm during the whole of his visit. He did not know a great deal about
+chicken farming, but he was certain that Ukridge knew less. There
+would be some strenuous moments before that farm became a profitable
+commercial speculation. At the thought of Ukridge toiling on a hot
+afternoon to manage an undisciplined mob of fowls, and becoming more
+and more heated and voluble in the struggle, he laughed and promptly
+swallowed a generous mouthful of salt water. There are few things
+which depress the swimmer more than an involuntary draught of water.
+Garnet turned and swam back to Bob and the clothes.
+
+As he strolled back along the beach he came upon a small, elderly
+gentleman toweling his head in a vigorous manner. Hearing Garnet's
+footsteps, he suspended this operation for a moment and peered out at
+him from beneath a turban of towel.
+
+It was the elderly Irishman of the journey, the father of the
+blue-eyed Phyllis. Then they had come on to Lyme Regis after all.
+Garnet stopped, with some idea of going back and speaking to him; but
+realizing that they were perfect strangers, he postponed this action
+and followed Bob up the hill. In a small place like Lyme Regis it
+would surely not be difficult to find somebody who would introduce
+them. He cursed the custom which made such a thing necessary. In a
+properly constituted country everybody would know everybody else
+without fuss or trouble.
+
+He found Ukridge, in his shirt sleeves and minus a collar, assailing a
+large ham. Mrs. Ukridge, looking younger and more childlike than ever
+in brown holland, smiled at him over the teapot.
+
+"Here he is!" shouted Ukridge, catching sight of him. "Where have you
+been, old horse? I went to your room, but you weren't there. Bathing?
+Hope it's made you feel fit for work, because we've got to buckle to
+this morning."
+
+"The fowls have arrived, Mr. Garnet," said Mrs. Ukridge, opening her
+eyes till she looked like an astonished kitten. "_Such_ a lot of them!
+They're making such a noise!"
+
+And to support her statement there floated through the window a
+cackling, which, for volume and variety of key, beat anything that
+Garnet had ever heard. Judging from the noise, it seemed as if England
+had been drained of fowls and the entire tribe of them dumped into the
+yard of the Ukridge's farm.
+
+"There seems to have been no stint," he said, sitting down. "Did you
+order a million or only nine hundred thousand?"
+
+"Good many, aren't there?" said Ukridge complacently. "But that's
+what we want. No good starting on a small scale. The more you have,
+the bigger the profits."
+
+"What sort have you got mostly?"
+
+"Oh, all sorts. Bless you, people don't mind what breed a fowl is, so
+long as it _is_ a fowl. These dealer chaps were so infernally
+particular. 'Any Dorkings?' they said. 'All right,' I said, 'bring on
+your Dorkings.' 'Or perhaps you want a few Minorcas?' 'Very well,' I
+said, 'show Minorcas.' They were going on--they'd have gone on for
+hours, but I stopped 'em. 'Look here, Maximilian,' I said to the
+manager Johnny--decent old chap, with the manners of a marquis--'look
+here,' I said, 'life is short, and we're neither of us as young as we
+used to be. Don't let us waste the golden hours playing guessing
+games. I want fowls. You sell fowls. So give me some of all sorts.'
+And he has, by Jove! There must be one of every breed ever invented."
+
+"Where are you going to put them?"
+
+"That spot we chose by the paddock. That's the place. Plenty of mud
+for them to scratch about in, and they can go into the field when they
+want to, and pick up worms, or whatever they feed on. We must rig them
+up some sort of a shanty, I suppose, this morning. We'll go and tell
+'em to send up some wire netting and stuff from the town."
+
+"Then we shall want hencoops. We shall have to make those."
+
+"Of course. So we shall. Millie, didn't I tell you that old Garnet was
+the man to think of things! I forgot the coops. We can't buy some, I
+suppose? On tick?"
+
+"Cheaper to make them. Suppose we get a lot of boxes. Soap boxes are
+as good as any. It won't take long to knock up a few coops."
+
+Ukridge thumped the table with enthusiasm.
+
+"Garny, old horse, you're a marvel. You think of everything. We'll
+buckle to right away. What a noise those fowls are making. I suppose
+they don't feel at home in the yard. Wait till they see the A1
+residential mansions we're going to put up for them. Finished
+breakfast? Then let's go out. Come along, Millie."
+
+The red-headed Beale, discovered leaning in an attitude of thought on
+the yard gate, and observing the feathered mob below, was roused from
+his reflections and dispatched to the town for the wire and soap
+boxes. Ukridge, taking his place at the gate, gazed at the fowls with
+the affectionate eye of a proprietor.
+
+"Well, they have certainly taken you at your word," said Garnet, "as
+far as variety is concerned."
+
+The man with the manners of a marquis seemed to have been at great
+pains to send a really representative supply of fowls. There were blue
+ones, black ones, white, gray, yellow, brown, big, little, Dorkings,
+Minorcas, Cochin Chinas, Bantams, Orpingtons, Wyandottes, and a host
+more. It was an imposing spectacle.
+
+The hired man returned toward the end of the morning, preceded by a
+cart containing the necessary wire and boxes, and Ukridge, whose
+enthusiasm brooked no delay, started immediately the task of
+fashioning the coops, while Garnet, assisted by Beale, draped the wire
+netting about the chosen spot next to the paddock. There were little
+unpleasantnesses--once a roar of anguish told that Ukridge's hammer
+had found the wrong billet, and on another occasion Garnet's flannel
+trousers suffered on the wire--but the work proceeded steadily. By the
+middle of the afternoon things were in a sufficiently advanced state
+to suggest to Ukridge the advisability of a halt for refreshments.
+
+"That's the way to do it," said he. "At this rate we shall have the
+place in A1 condition before bedtime. What do you think of those for
+coops, Beale?"
+
+The hired man examined them gravely.
+
+"I've seen worse, sir."
+
+He continued his examination.
+
+"But not many," he added. Beale's passion for truth had made him
+unpopular in three regiments.
+
+"They aren't so bad," said Garnet, "but I'm glad I'm not a fowl."
+
+"So you ought to be," said Ukridge, "considering the way you've put up
+that wire. You'll have them strangling themselves."
+
+In spite of earnest labor, the housing arrangements of the fowls were
+still in an incomplete state at the end of the day. The details of the
+evening's work are preserved in a letter which Garnet wrote that
+night to his friend Lickford.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+"... Have you ever played a game called 'Pigs in Clover'? We have just
+finished a bout of it (with hens instead of marbles) which has lasted
+for an hour and a half. We are all dead tired except the hired man,
+who seems to be made of India rubber. He has just gone for a stroll to
+the beach. Wants some exercise, I suppose. Personally, I feel as if I
+should never move again. I have run faster and farther than I have
+done since I was at school. You have no conception of the difficulty
+of rounding up fowls and getting them safely to bed. Having no proper
+place to put them, we were obliged to stow some of them inside soap
+boxes and the rest in the basement. It has only just occurred to me
+that they ought to have had perches to roost on. It didn't strike me
+before. I shall not mention it to Ukridge, or that indomitable man
+will start making some, and drag me into it, too. After all, a hen can
+rough it for one night, and if I did a stroke more work I should
+collapse. My idea was to do the thing on the slow but sure principle.
+That is to say, take each bird singly and carry it to bed. It would
+have taken some time, but there would have been no confusion. But you
+can imagine that that sort of thing would not appeal to Ukridge. There
+is a touch of the Napoleon about him. He likes his maneuvers to be
+daring and on a large scale. He said: 'Open the yard gate and let the
+fowls come out into the open, then sail in and drive them in a mass
+through the back door into the basement.' It was a great idea, but
+there was one fatal flaw in it. It didn't allow for the hens
+scattering. We opened the gate, and out they all came like an audience
+coming out of a theater. Then we closed in on them to bring off the
+big drive. For about three seconds it looked as if we might do it.
+Then Bob, the hired man's dog, an animal who likes to be in whatever's
+going on, rushed out of the house into the middle of them, barking.
+There was a perfect stampede, and Heaven only knows where some of
+those fowls are now. There was one in particular, a large yellow bird,
+which, I should imagine, is nearing London by this time. The last I
+saw of it, it was navigating at the rate of knots, so to speak, in
+that direction, with Bob after it barking his hardest. Presently Bob
+came back, panting, having evidently given up the job. We, in the
+meantime, were chasing the rest of the birds all over the garden. The
+thing had now resolved itself into the course of action I had
+suggested originally, except that instead of collecting them quietly
+and at our leisure, we had to run miles for each one we captured.
+After a time we introduced some sort of system into it. Mrs. Ukridge
+(fancy him married; did you know?) stood at the door. We chased the
+hens and brought them in. Then as we put each through into the
+basement, she shut the door on it. We also arranged Ukridge's soap-box
+coops in a row, and when we caught a fowl we put it into the coop and
+stuck a board in front of it. By these strenuous means we gathered in
+about two thirds of the lot. The rest are all over England. A few may
+be in Dorsetshire, but I should not like to bet on it.
+
+"So you see things are being managed on the up-to-date chicken farm on
+good, sound, Ukridge principles. This is only the beginning. I look
+with confidence for further exciting events. I believe, if Ukridge
+kept white mice, he would manage to knock some feverish excitement out
+of it. He is at present lying on the sofa, smoking one of his infernal
+brand of cigars. From the basement I can hear faintly the murmur of
+innumerable fowls. We are a happy family; we are, we _are_, we ARE!
+
+"P. S. Have you ever caught a fowl and carried it to roost? You take
+it under the wings, and the feel of it sets one's teeth on edge. It is
+a grisly experience. All the time you are carrying it, it makes faint
+protesting noises and struggles feebly to escape.
+
+"P. P. S. You know the opinion of Pythagoras respecting fowls. That
+'the soul of our granddam might haply inhabit a bird.' I hope that
+yellow hen which Bob chased into the purple night is not the
+grandmamma of any friend of mine."
+
+
+
+
+A REUNION
+
+VI
+
+
+The day was Thursday, the date July the twenty-second. We had been
+chicken farmers for a whole week, and things were beginning to settle
+down to a certain extent. The coops were finished. They were not
+masterpieces, and I have seen chickens pause before them in deep
+thought, as who should say: "Now what in the world have we struck
+here?" But they were coops, within the meaning of the act, and we
+induced the hens to become tenants. The hardest work had been the
+fixing of the wire netting. This was the department of the hired man
+and myself. Beale and I worked ourselves into a fever in the sun,
+while the senior partner of the firm sat in the house, writing out
+plans and ideas and scribbling down his accounts (which must have been
+complicated) on gilt-edged correspondence cards. From time to time he
+abused his creditors, who were numerous.
+
+Ukridge's financial methods were always puzzling to the ordinary mind.
+We had hardly been at the farm a day before he began to order in a
+vast supply of necessary and unnecessary articles--all on credit. Some
+he got from the village, others from neighboring towns. He has a way
+with him, like Father O'Flynn, and the tradesmen behaved beautifully.
+The things began to pour in from all sides--suits, groceries (of the
+very best), a piano, a gramophone, and pictures of all kinds. He was
+not one of those men who want but little here below. He wanted a great
+deal, and of a superior quality. If a tradesman suggested that a small
+check on account would not be taken amiss, as one or two sordid
+fellows of the village did, he became pathetic.
+
+"Confound it, sir," he would say with tears in his voice, laying a
+hand on the man's shoulder in an elder brotherly way, "it's a trifle
+hard when a gentleman comes to settle here, that you should dun him
+for things before he has settled the preliminary expenses about his
+house."
+
+This sounded well, and suggested the disbursement of huge sums for
+rent. The fact that the house had been lent him rent free was kept
+with some care in the background. Having weakened the man with pathos,
+he would strike a sterner note. "A little more of this," he would go
+on, "and I'll close my account. As it is, I think I will remove my
+patronage to a firm which will treat me civilly. Why, sir, I've never
+heard anything like it in all my experience." Upon which the man
+would knuckle under and go away forgiven, with a large order for more
+goods.
+
+Once, when Ukridge and I were alone, I ventured to expostulate. High
+finance was always beyond my mental grasp. "Pay?" he exclaimed, "of
+course we shall pay. You don't seem to realize the possibilities of
+this business. Garny, my boy, we are on to a big thing. The money
+isn't coming in yet. We must give it time. But soon we shall be
+turning over hundreds every week. I am in touch with Whiteley's and
+Harrod's and all the big places. Perfectly simple business matter.
+Here I am, I said, with a large chicken farm with all the modern
+improvements. You want eggs, I said. I supply them. I will let you
+have so many hundred eggs a week, I said; what will you give for them?
+Well, their terms did not come up to my scheduled prices, I admit, but
+we mustn't sneer at small prices at first."
+
+The upshot of it was that the firms mentioned supplied us with a
+quantity of goods, agreeing to receive phantom eggs in exchange. This
+satisfied Ukridge. He had a faith in the laying powers of his hens
+which would have flattered those birds if they could have known of it.
+It might also have stimulated their efforts in that direction, which
+up to date were feeble. This, however, I attributed to the fact that
+the majority of our fowls--perhaps through some sinister practical
+joke on the part of the manager who had the manners of a marquis--were
+cocks. It vexed Ukridge. "Here we are," he said complainingly, "living
+well and drinking well, in a newly furnished house, having to keep a
+servant and maintain our position in life, with expenses mounting and
+not a penny coming in. It's absurd. We've got hundreds of hens (most
+of them cocks, it's true, but I forgot they didn't lay), and getting
+not even enough eggs for our own table. We must make some more
+arrangements. Come on in and let us think the thing out."
+
+But this speech was the outcome of a rare moment of pessimism. In his
+brighter moods he continued to express unbounded faith in the hens,
+and was willing to leave the thing to time.
+
+Meanwhile, we were creating quite a small sensation in the
+neighborhood. The interest of the natives was aroused at first by the
+fact that nearly all of them received informal visits from our fowls,
+which had strayed. Small boys would arrive in platoons, each bearing
+his quota of stragglers. "Be these your 'ens, zur?" was the formula.
+"If they be, we've got twenty-fower mower in our yard. Could 'ee coom
+over and fetch 'em?"
+
+However, after the hired retainer and I had completed our work with
+the wire netting, desertions became less frequent. People poured in
+from villages for miles around to look at the up-to-date chicken farm.
+It was a pleasing and instructive spectacle to see Ukridge, in a pink
+shirt without a collar, and very dirty flannel trousers, lecturing to
+the intelligent natives on the breeding of fowls. They used to go away
+with the dazed air of men who have heard strange matters, and Ukridge,
+unexhausted, would turn to interview the next batch. I fancy we gave
+Lyme Regis something to think about. Ukridge must have been in the
+nature of a staggerer to the rustic mind.
+
+It was now, as I have said, Thursday, the twenty-second of July, a
+memorable date to me. A glorious, sunny morning, of the kind which
+Nature provides occasionally, in an ebullition of benevolence. It is
+at times such as this that we dream our dreams and compose our
+masterpieces.
+
+And a masterpiece I was, indeed, making. The new novel was growing
+nobly. Striking scenes and freshets of scintillating dialogue rushed
+through my mind. I had neglected my writing for the past week in favor
+of the tending of fowls, but I was making up for lost time now.
+Another uninterrupted quarter of an hour, and I firmly believe I
+should have completed the framework of a novel that would have placed
+me with the great, in that select band whose members have no Christian
+names. Another quarter of an hour and posterity would have known me as
+"Garnet."
+
+But it was not to be. I had just framed the most poignant, searching
+conversation between my heroine and my hero, and was about to proceed,
+flushed with great thoughts, to further triumphs, when a distant shout
+brought me to earth.
+
+"Stop her! Catch her! Garnet!"
+
+I was in the paddock at the time. Coming toward me at her best pace
+was a small hen. Behind the hen was Bob, doing, as usual, the thing
+that he ought not to have done. Behind Bob--some way behind--was
+Ukridge. It was his shout that I had heard.
+
+"After her, Garny, old horse!" he repeated. "A valuable bird. Must not
+be lost."
+
+When not in a catalepsy of literary composition, I am essentially the
+man of action. I laid aside my novel for future reference, and, after
+a fruitless lunge at the hen as it passed, joined Bob in the chase.
+
+We passed out of the paddock in the following order: First, the hen,
+as fresh as paint, and good for a five-mile spin; next, Bob, panting
+but fit for anything; lastly, myself, determined, but mistrustful of
+my powers of pedestrianism. In the distance Ukridge gesticulated and
+shouted advice.
+
+After the first field Bob gave up the chase, and sauntered off to
+scratch at a rabbit hole. He seemed to think that he had done all that
+could be expected of him in setting the thing going. His air suggested
+that he knew the affair was in competent hands, and relied on me to do
+the right thing.
+
+The exertions of the past few days had left me in very fair condition,
+but I could not help feeling that in competition with the hen I was
+overmatched. Neither in speed nor in staying power was I its equal.
+But I pounded along doggedly. Whenever I find myself fairly started on
+any business I am reluctant to give it up. I began to set an
+extravagant value on the capture of the small hen. All the abstract
+desire for fame which had filled my mind five minutes before was
+concentrated now on that one feat. In a calmer moment I might have
+realized that one bird more or less would not make a great deal of
+difference to the fortunes of the chicken farm, but now my power of
+logical reasoning had left me. All our fortunes seemed to me to center
+in the hen, now half a field in front of me.
+
+We had been traveling downhill all this time, but at this point we
+crossed the road and the ground began to rise. I was in that painful
+condition which occurs when one has lost one's first wind and has not
+yet got one's second. I was hotter than I had ever been in my life.
+
+Whether the hen, too, was beginning to feel the effects of its run I
+do not know, but it slowed down to a walk, and even began to peck in a
+tentative manner at the grass. This assumption on its part that the
+chase was at an end irritated me. I felt that I should not be worthy
+of the name of Englishman if I allowed myself to be treated as a
+cipher by a mere bird. It should realize yet that it was no light
+matter to be pursued by J. Garnet, author of "The Maneuvers of
+Arthur," etc.
+
+A judicious increase of pace brought me within a yard or two of my
+quarry. But it darted from me with a startled exclamation and moved
+off rapidly up the hill. I followed, distressed. The pace was proving
+too much for me. The sun blazed down. It seemed to concentrate its
+rays on my back, to the exclusion of the surrounding scenery, in much
+the same way as the moon behaves to the heroine of a melodrama. A
+student of the drama has put it on record that he has seen the moon
+follow the heroine round the stage, and go off with her (left). The
+sun was just as attentive to me.
+
+We were on level ground now. The hen had again slowed to a walk, and I
+was capable of no better pace. Very gradually I closed in on it. There
+was a high boxwood hedge in front of us. Just as I came close enough
+to stake my all on a single grab, the hen dived into this and
+struggled through in the mysterious way in which birds do get through
+hedges.
+
+I was in the middle of the obstacle, very hot, tired, and dirty, when
+from the other side I heard a sudden shout of "Mark over! Bird to the
+right!" and the next moment I found myself emerging, with a black face
+and tottering knees, on to the gravel path of a private garden.
+
+Beyond the path was a croquet lawn, on which I perceived, as through a
+glass darkly, three figures. The mist cleared from my eyes and I
+recognized two of the trio.
+
+One was my Irish fellow-traveler, the other was his daughter.
+
+The third member of the party was a man, a stranger to me. By some
+miracle of adroitness he had captured the hen, and was holding it,
+protesting, in a workman-like manner behind the wings.
+
+
+
+
+THE ENTENTE CORDIALE
+
+VII
+
+
+It has been well observed that there are moments and moments. The
+present, as far as I was concerned, belonged to the more painful
+variety.
+
+Even to my exhausted mind it was plain that there was need here for
+explanations. An Irishman's croquet lawn is his castle, and strangers
+cannot plunge on to it unannounced through hedges without being
+prepared to give reasons.
+
+Unfortunately, speech was beyond me. I could have done many things at
+that moment. I could have emptied a water butt, lain down and gone to
+sleep, or melted ice with a touch of the finger. But I could not
+speak. The conversation was opened by the other man, in whose
+soothing hand the hen now lay, apparently resigned to its fate.
+
+"Come right in," he said pleasantly. "Don't knock. Your bird, I
+think?"
+
+I stood there panting. I must have presented a quaint appearance. My
+hair was full of twigs and other foreign substances. My face was moist
+and grimy. My mouth hung open. I wanted to sit down. My legs felt as
+if they had ceased to belong to me.
+
+"I must apologize--" I began, and ended the sentence with gasps.
+
+Conversation languished. The elderly gentleman looked at me with what
+seemed to me indignant surprise. His daughter looked through me. The
+man regarded me with a friendly smile, as if I were some old crony
+dropped in unexpectedly.
+
+"I'm afraid--" I said, and stopped again.
+
+"Hard work, big-game hunting in this weather," said the man. "Take a
+long breath."
+
+I took several and felt better.
+
+"I must apologize for this intrusion," I said successfully.
+"Unwarrantable" would have rounded off the sentence nicely, but
+instinct told me not to risk it. It would have been mere bravado to
+have attempted unnecessary words of five syllables at that juncture.
+
+I paused.
+
+"Say on," said the man with the hen encouragingly, "I'm a human being
+just like yourself."
+
+"The fact is," I said, "I didn't--didn't know there was a private
+garden beyond the hedge. If you will give me my hen--"
+
+"It's hard to say good-by," said the man, stroking the bird's head
+with the first finger of his disengaged hand. "She and I are just
+beginning to know and appreciate each other. However, if it must be--"
+
+He extended the hand which held the bird, and at this point a hitch
+occurred. He did his part of the business--the letting go. It was in
+my department--the taking hold--that the thing was bungled. The hen
+slipped from my grasp like an eel, stood for a moment overcome by the
+surprise of being at liberty once more, then fled and intrenched
+itself in some bushes at the farther end of the lawn.
+
+There are times when the most resolute man feels that he can battle no
+longer with fate; when everything seems against him and the only
+course left is a dignified retreat. But there is one thing essential
+to a dignified retreat. One must know the way out. It was that fact
+which kept me standing there, looking more foolish than anyone has
+ever looked since the world began. I could hardly ask to be conducted
+off the premises like the honored guest. Nor would it do to retire by
+the way I had come. If I could have leaped the hedge with a single
+bound, that would have made a sufficiently dashing and debonair exit.
+But the hedge was high, and I was incapable at the moment of achieving
+a debonair leap over a footstool.
+
+The man saved the situation. He seemed to possess that magnetic power
+over his fellows which marks the born leader. Under his command we
+became an organized army. The common object, the pursuit of the hen,
+made us friends. In the first minute of the proceedings the Irishman
+was addressing me as "me dear boy," and the other man, who had
+introduced himself rapidly as Tom Chase, lieutenant in his Majesty's
+navy, was shouting directions to me by name. I have never assisted at
+any ceremony at which formality was so completely dispensed with. The
+ice was not merely broken, it was shivered into a million fragments.
+
+"Go in and drive her out, Garnet," shouted Mr. Chase. "In my
+direction, if you can. Look out on the left, Phyllis."
+
+Even in that disturbing moment I could not help noticing his use of
+the Christian name. It seemed to me sinister. I did not like the idea
+of dashing young lieutenants in the royal navy calling a girl Phyllis
+whose eyes had haunted me for just over a week--since, in fact, I had
+first seen them. Nevertheless, I crawled into the bushes and dislodged
+the hen. She emerged at the spot where Mr. Chase was waiting with his
+coat off, and was promptly enveloped in that garment and captured.
+
+"The essence of strategy," observed Mr. Chase approvingly, "is
+surprise. A devilish neat piece of work."
+
+I thanked him. He deprecated the thanks. He had, he said, only done
+his duty, as a man is bound to do. He then introduced me to the
+elderly Irishman, who was, it seemed, a professor--of what I do not
+know--at Dublin University. By name, Derrick. He informed me that he
+always spent the summer at Lyme Regis.
+
+"I was surprised to see you at Lyme Regis," I said. "When you got out
+at Yeovil, I thought I had seen the last of you."
+
+I think I am gifted beyond other men as regards the unfortunate
+turning of sentences.
+
+"I meant," I added speedily, "I was afraid I had."
+
+"Ah, of course," he said, "you were in our carriage coming down. I was
+confident I had seen you before. I never forget a face."
+
+"It would be a kindness," said Mr. Chase, "if you would forget
+Garnet's as now exhibited. You'll excuse the personality, but you
+seem to have collected a good deal of the professor's property coming
+through that hedge."
+
+"I was wondering," I said with gratitude. "A wash--if I might?"
+
+"Of course, me boy, of course," said the professor. "Tom, take Mr.
+Garnet off to your room, and then we'll have some lunch. You'll stay
+to lunch, Mr. Garnet?"
+
+I thanked him for his kindness and went off with my friend, the
+lieutenant, to the house. We imprisoned the hen in the stables, to its
+profound indignation, gave directions for lunch to be served to it,
+and made our way to Mr. Chase's room.
+
+"So you've met the professor before?" he said, hospitably laying out a
+change of raiment for me--we were fortunately much of a height and
+build.
+
+"I have never spoken to him," I said. "We traveled down together in a
+very full carriage, and I saw him next day on the beach."
+
+"He's a dear old boy, if you rub him the right way."
+
+"Yes?" I said.
+
+"But--I'm telling you this for your good and guidance--he can cut up
+rough. And when he does, he goes off like a four point seven. I think,
+if I were you--you don't mind my saying this?--I think, if I were you,
+I should _not_ mention Mr. Tim Healy at lunch."
+
+I promised that I would try to resist the temptation.
+
+"And if you _could_ manage not to discuss home rule--"
+
+"I will make an effort."
+
+"On any other topic he will be delighted to hear your views. Chatty
+remarks on bimetallism would meet with his earnest attention. A
+lecture on what to do with the cold mutton would be welcomed. But not
+Ireland, if you don't mind. Shall we go down?"
+
+We got to know one another very well at lunch.
+
+"Do you hunt hens," asked Mr. Chase, who was mixing the salad--he was
+one of those men who seem to do everything a shade better than anyone
+else, "for amusement or by your doctor's orders?"
+
+"Neither," I said, "and particularly not for amusement. The fact is I
+have been lured down here by a friend of mine who has started a
+chicken farm--"
+
+I was interrupted. All three of them burst into laughter. Mr. Chase in
+his emotion allowed the vinegar to trickle on to the cloth, missing
+the salad bowl by a clear two inches.
+
+"You don't mean to tell us," he said, "that you really come from the
+one and only chicken farm?"
+
+I could not deny it.
+
+"Why, you're the man we've all been praying to meet for days past.
+Haven't we, professor?"
+
+"You're right, Tom," chuckled Mr. Derrick.
+
+"We want to know all about it, Mr. Garnet," said Phyllis Derrick.
+
+"Do you know," continued Mr. Chase, "that you are the talk of the
+town? Everybody is discussing you. Your methods are quite new and
+original, aren't they?"
+
+"Probably," I replied. "Ukridge knows nothing about fowls. I know
+less. He considers it an advantage. He said our minds ought to be
+unbiased by any previous experience."
+
+"Ukridge!" said the professor. "That was the name old Dawlish, the
+grocer, said. I never forget a name. He is the gentleman who lectures
+on the breeding of poultry, is he not? You do not?"
+
+I hastened to disclaim any such feat.
+
+"His lectures are very popular," said Phyllis with a little splutter
+of mirth.
+
+"He enjoys them," I said.
+
+"Look here, Garnet," said Mr. Chase, "I hope you won't consider all
+these questions impertinent, but you've no notion of the thrilling
+interest we all take--at a distance--in your farm. We have been
+talking of nothing else for a week. I have dreamed of it three nights
+running. Is Mr. Ukridge doing this as a commercial speculation, or is
+he an eccentric millionaire?"
+
+"He's not a millionaire. I believe he intends to be, though, before
+long, with the assistance of the fowls. But I hope you won't look on
+me as in any way responsible for the arrangements at the farm. I am
+merely a laborer. The brain work of the business lies in Ukridge's
+department."
+
+"Tell me, Mr. Garnet," said Phyllis, "do you use an incubator?"
+
+"Oh, yes, we have an incubator."
+
+"I suppose you find it very useful?"
+
+"I'm afraid we use it chiefly for drying our boots when they get wet,"
+I said.
+
+Only that morning Ukridge's spare pair of tennis shoes had permanently
+spoiled the future of half-a-dozen eggs which were being hatched on
+the spot where the shoes happened to be placed. Ukridge had been quite
+annoyed.
+
+"I came down here principally," I said, "in search of golf. I was told
+there were links, but up to the present my professional duties have
+monopolized me."
+
+"Golf," said Professor Derrick. "Why, yes. We must have a round or two
+together. I am very fond of golf. I generally spend the summer down
+here improving my game."
+
+I said I should be delighted.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+There was croquet after lunch--a game at which I am a poor performer.
+Miss Derrick and I played the professor and Chase. Chase was a little
+better than myself; the professor, by dint of extreme earnestness and
+care, managed to play a fair game; and Phyllis was an expert.
+
+"I was reading a book," said she, as we stood together watching the
+professor shaping at his ball at the other end of the lawn, "by an
+author of the same surname as you, Mr. Garnet. Is he a relation of
+yours?"
+
+"I am afraid I am the person, Miss Derrick," I said.
+
+"You wrote the book?"
+
+"A man must live," I said apologetically.
+
+"Then you must have--oh, nothing."
+
+"I could not help it, I'm afraid. But your criticism was very kind."
+
+"Did you know what I was going to say?"
+
+"I guessed."
+
+"It was lucky I liked it," she said with a smile.
+
+"Lucky for me," I said.
+
+"Why?"
+
+"It will encourage me to write another book. So you see what you have
+to answer for. I hope it will not trouble your conscience."
+
+At the other end of the lawn the professor was still patting the balls
+about, Chase the while advising him to allow for windage and elevation
+and other mysterious things.
+
+"I should not have thought," she said, "that an author cared a bit for
+the opinion of an amateur."
+
+"It all depends."
+
+"On the author?"
+
+"On the amateur."
+
+It was my turn to play at this point. I missed--as usual.
+
+"I didn't like your heroine, Mr. Garnet."
+
+"That was the one crumpled rose leaf. I have been wondering why ever
+since. I tried to make her nice. Three of the critics liked her."
+
+"Really?"
+
+"And the modern reviewer is an intelligent young man. What is a
+'creature,' Miss Derrick?"
+
+"Pamela in your book is a creature," she replied unsatisfactorily,
+with the slightest tilt of the chin.
+
+"My next heroine shall be a triumph," I said.
+
+She should be a portrait, I resolved, from life.
+
+Shortly after, the game came somehow to an end. I do not understand
+the intricacies of croquet. But Phyllis did something brilliant and
+remarkable with the balls, and we adjourned for tea, which had been
+made ready at the edge of the lawn while we played.
+
+The sun was setting as I left to return to the farm, with the hen
+stored neatly in a basket in my hand. The air was deliciously cool and
+full of that strange quiet which follows soothingly on the skirts of a
+broiling midsummer afternoon. Far away--the sound seemed almost to
+come from another world--the tinkle of a sheep bell made itself heard,
+deepening the silence. Alone in a sky of the palest blue there
+twinkled a small bright star.
+
+I addressed this star.
+
+"She was certainly very nice to me," I said. "Very nice, indeed."
+
+The star said nothing.
+
+"On the other hand," I went on, "I don't like that naval man. He is a
+good chap, but he overdoes it."
+
+The star winked sympathetically.
+
+"He calls her Phyllis," I said.
+
+"Charawk," said the hen satirically from her basket.
+
+
+
+
+A LITTLE DINNER
+
+VIII
+
+
+"Edwin comes to-day," said Mrs. Ukridge.
+
+"And the Derricks," said Ukridge, sawing at the bread in his energetic
+way. "Don't forget the Derricks, Millie."
+
+"No, dear. Mrs. Beale is going to give us a very nice dinner. We
+talked it over yesterday."
+
+"Who is Edwin?" I asked.
+
+We were finishing breakfast on the second morning after my visit to
+the Derricks. I had related my adventures to the staff of the farm on
+my return, laying stress on the merits of our neighbors and their
+interest in our doings, and the hired retainer had been sent off next
+morning with a note from Mrs. Ukridge, inviting them to look over the
+farm and stay to dinner.
+
+"Edwin?" said Ukridge. "Beast of a cat."
+
+"O Stanley!" said Mrs. Ukridge plaintively. "He's not. He's such a
+dear, Mr. Garnet. A beautiful, pure-bred Persian. He has taken
+prizes."
+
+"He's always taking something--generally food. That's why he didn't
+come down with us."
+
+"A great, horrid _beast_ of a dog bit him, Mr. Garnet." Mrs. Ukridge's
+eyes became round and shining. "And poor Edwin had to go to a cats'
+hospital."
+
+"And I hope," said Ukridge, "the experience will do him good. Sneaked
+a dog's bone, Garnet, under his very nose, if you please. Naturally,
+the dog lodged a protest."
+
+"I'm so afraid that he will be frightened of Bob. He will be very
+timid, and Bob's so exceedingly boisterous. Isn't he, Mr. Garnet?"
+
+I owned that Bob's manner was not that of a Vere de Vere.
+
+"That's all right," said Ukridge; "Bob won't hurt him, unless he tries
+to steal his bone. In that case we will have Edwin made into a rug."
+
+"Stanley doesn't like Edwin," said Mrs. Ukridge plaintively.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Edwin arrived early in the afternoon, and was shut into the kitchen.
+He struck me as a handsome cat, but nervous. He had an excited eye.
+
+The Derricks followed two hours later. Mr. Chase was not of the party.
+
+"Tom had to go to London," explained the professor, "or he would have
+been delighted to come. It was a disappointment to the boy, for he
+wanted to see the farm."
+
+"He must come some other time," said Ukridge. "We invite inspection.
+Look here," he broke off suddenly--we were nearing the fowl run now,
+Mrs. Ukridge walking in front with Phyllis Derrick--"were you ever at
+Bristol?"
+
+"Never, sir," said the professor.
+
+"Because I knew just such another fat little buffer there a few years
+ago. Gay old bird, he was. He--"
+
+"This is the fowl run, professor," I broke in, with a moist, tingling
+feeling across my forehead and up my spine. I saw the professor
+stiffen as he walked, while his face deepened in color. Ukridge's
+breezy way of expressing himself is apt to electrify the stranger.
+
+"You will notice the able way--ha, ha!--in which the wire netting is
+arranged," I continued feverishly. "Took some doing, that. By Jove!
+yes. It was hot work. Nice lot of fowls, aren't they? Rather a mixed
+lot, of course. Ha, ha! That's the dealer's fault, though. We are
+getting quite a number of eggs now. Hens wouldn't lay at first.
+Couldn't make them."
+
+I babbled on till from the corner of my eye I saw the flush fade from
+the professor's face and his back gradually relax its pokerlike
+attitude. The situation was saved for the moment, but there was no
+knowing what further excesses Ukridge might indulge in. I managed to
+draw him aside as we went through the fowl run, and expostulated.
+
+"For goodness' sake, be careful," I whispered. "You've no notion how
+touchy the professor is."
+
+"But _I_ said nothing," he replied, amazed.
+
+"Hang it, you know, nobody likes to be called a fat little buffer to
+his face."
+
+"What else could I call him? Nobody minds a little thing like that. We
+can't be stilted and formal. It's ever so much more friendly to relax
+and be chummy."
+
+Here we rejoined the others, and I was left with a leaden foreboding
+of grewsome things in store. I knew what manner of man Ukridge was
+when he relaxed and became chummy. Friendships of years' standing had
+failed to survive the test.
+
+For the time being, however, all went well. In his role of lecturer he
+offended no one, and Phyllis and her father behaved admirably. They
+received the strangest theories without a twitch of the mouth.
+
+"Ah," the professor would say, "now, is that really so? Very
+interesting, indeed."
+
+Only once, when Ukridge was describing some more than usually original
+device for the furthering of the interests of his fowls, did a slight
+spasm disturb Phyllis's look of attentive reverence.
+
+"And you have really had no previous experience in chicken farming?"
+she said.
+
+"None," said Ukridge, beaming through his glasses, "not an atom. But I
+can turn my hand to anything, you know. Things seem to come naturally
+to me, somehow."
+
+"I see," said Phyllis.
+
+It was while matters were progressing with such beautiful smoothness
+that I observed the square form of the hired retainer approaching us.
+Somehow--I cannot say why--I had a feeling that he came with bad news.
+Perhaps it was his air of quiet satisfaction which struck me as
+ominous.
+
+"Beg pardon, Mr. Ukridge, sir."
+
+Ukridge was in the middle of a very eloquent excursus on the feeding
+of fowls. The interruption annoyed him.
+
+"Well, Beale," he said, "what is it?"
+
+"That there cat, sir, what came to-day."
+
+"O Beale," cried Mrs. Ukridge in agitation, "_what_ has happened?"
+
+"Having something to say to the missus--"
+
+"What has happened? O Beale, don't say that Edwin has been hurt? Where
+is he? Oh, _poor_ Edwin!"
+
+"Having something to say to the missus--"
+
+"If Bob has bitten him, I hope he had his nose _well_ scratched," said
+Mrs. Ukridge vindictively.
+
+"Having something to say to the missus," resumed the hired retainer
+tranquilly, "I went into the kitchen ten minutes back. The cat was
+sitting on the mat."
+
+Beale's narrative style closely resembled that of a certain book I had
+read in my infancy. I wish I could remember its title. It was a
+well-written book.
+
+"Yes, Beale, yes?" said Mrs. Ukridge. "Oh, do go on!"
+
+"'Halloo, puss,' I says to him, 'and 'ow are you, sir?' 'Be careful,'
+says the missus. ''E's that timid,' she says, 'you wouldn't believe,'
+she says. ''E's only just settled down, as you may say,' she says.
+'Ho, don't you fret,' I says to her, ''im and me we understands each
+other. 'Im and me,' I says, 'is old friends. 'E's me dear old pal,
+Corporal Banks, of the Skrimshankers.' She grinned at that, ma'am,
+Corporal Banks being a man we'd 'ad many a 'earty laugh at in the old
+days. 'E was, in a manner of speaking, a joke between us."
+
+"Oh, do--go--on, Beale! What has happened to Edwin?"
+
+The hired retainer proceeded in calm, even tones.
+
+"We was talking there, ma'am, when Bob, which had followed me unknown,
+trotted in. When the cat ketched sight of 'im sniffing about, there
+was such a spitting and swearing as you never 'eard, and blowed," said
+Mr. Beale amusedly, as if the recollection tickled him, "blowed if the
+old cat didn't give one jump and move in quick time up the chimley,
+where 'e now remains, paying no 'eed to the missus's attempts to get
+him down again."
+
+Sensation, as they say in the reports.
+
+"But he'll be cooked," cried Phyllis, open-eyed.
+
+Ukridge uttered a roar of dismay.
+
+"No, he won't. Nor will our dinner. Mrs. Beale always lets the kitchen
+fire out during the afternoon. It's a cold dinner we'll get to-night,
+if that cat doesn't come down."
+
+The professor's face fell. I had remarked on the occasion when I had
+lunched with him his evident fondness for the pleasures of the table.
+Cold, impromptu dinners were plainly not to his taste.
+
+We went to the kitchen in a body. Mrs. Beale was standing in front of
+the empty grate making seductive cat noises up the chimney.
+
+"What's all this, Mrs. Beale?" said Ukridge.
+
+"He won't come down, sir, not while he thinks Bob's about. And how I'm
+to cook dinner for five with him up the chimney I don't see, sir."
+
+"Prod at him with a broom handle, Mrs. Beale," urged Ukridge.
+
+"I 'ave tried that, sir, but I can't reach him, and I've only bin and
+drove 'im further up. What must be," added Mrs. Beale philosophically,
+"must be. He may come down of his own accord in the night. Bein'
+'ungry."
+
+"Then what we must do," said Ukridge in a jovial manner which to me at
+least seemed out of place, "is to have a regular, jolly, picnic
+dinner, what? Whack up whatever we have in the larder, and eat that."
+
+"A regular, jolly, picnic dinner," repeated the professor gloomily. I
+could read what was passing in his mind.
+
+"That will be delightful," said Phyllis.
+
+[Illustration: "I've only bin and drove 'im further up," said Mrs.
+Beale.]
+
+"Er--I think, my dear sir," said her father, "it would be hardly fair
+of us to give any further trouble to Mrs. Ukridge and yourself. If you
+will allow me, therefore, I will--"
+
+Ukridge became gushingly hospitable. He refused to think of allowing
+his guests to go empty away. He would be able to whack up something,
+he said. There was quite a good deal of the ham left, he was sure. He
+appealed to me to indorse his view that there was a tin of sardines
+and part of a cold fowl and plenty of bread and cheese.
+
+"And after all," he said, speaking for the whole company in the
+generous, comprehensive way enthusiasts have, "what more do we want in
+weather like this? A nice, light, cold dinner is ever so much better
+for us than a lot of hot things."
+
+The professor said nothing. He looked wan and unhappy.
+
+We strolled out again into the garden, but somehow things seemed to
+drag. Conversation was fitful, except on the part of Ukridge, who
+continued to talk easily on all subjects, unconscious of the fact that
+the party was depressed, and at least one of his guests rapidly
+becoming irritable. I watched the professor furtively as Ukridge
+talked on, and that ominous phrase of Mr. Chase's concerning
+four-point-seven guns kept coming into my mind. If Ukridge were to
+tread on any of his pet corns, as he might at any minute, there would
+be an explosion. The snatching of the dinner from his very mouth, as
+it were, and the substitution of a bread-and-cheese and sardines menu
+had brought him to the frame of mind when men turn and rend their
+nearest and dearest.
+
+The sight of the table, when at length we filed into the dining room,
+sent a chill through me. It was a meal for the very young or the very
+hungry. The uncompromising coldness and solidity of the viands was
+enough to appall a man conscious that his digestion needed humoring. A
+huge cheese faced us in almost a swash-buckling way, and I noticed
+that the professor shivered slightly as he saw it. Sardines, looking
+more oily and uninviting than anything I had ever seen, appeared in
+their native tin beyond the loaf of bread. There was a ham, in its
+third quarter, and a chicken which had suffered heavily during a
+previous visit to the table.
+
+We got through the meal somehow, and did our best to delude ourselves
+into the idea that it was all great fun, but it was a shallow
+pretense. The professor was very silent by the time we had finished.
+Ukridge had been terrible. When the professor began a story--his
+stories would have been the better for a little more briskness and
+condensation--Ukridge interrupted him before he had got halfway
+through, without a word of apology, and began some anecdote of his
+own. He disagreed with nearly every opinion he expressed. It is true
+that he did it all in such a perfectly friendly way, and was obviously
+so innocent of any intention of giving offense, that another man might
+have overlooked the matter. But the professor, robbed of his good
+dinner, was at the stage when he had to attack somebody. Every moment
+I had been expecting the storm to burst.
+
+It burst after dinner.
+
+We were strolling in the garden when some demon urged Ukridge, apropos
+of the professor's mention of Dublin, to start upon the Irish
+question. My heart stood still.
+
+Ukridge had boomed forth some very positive opinions of his own on the
+subject of Ireland before I could get near enough to him to stop him.
+When I did, I suppose I must have whispered louder than I had
+intended, for the professor heard my words, and they acted as the
+match to the powder.
+
+"He's touchy on the Irish question, is he?" he thundered. "Drop it, is
+it? And why? Why, sir? I'm one of the best-tempered men that ever came
+from Ireland, let me tell you, and I will not stay here to be insulted
+by the insinuation that I cannot discuss Irish affairs as calmly as
+anyone."
+
+"But, professor--"
+
+"Take your hand off my arm, Mr. Garnet. I will not be treated like a
+child. I am as competent to discuss the affairs of Ireland without
+heat as any man, let me tell you."
+
+"Father--"
+
+"And let me tell you, Mr. Ukridge, that I consider your opinions
+poisonous. Poisonous, sir. And you know nothing whatever about the
+subject, sir. I don't wish to see you or to speak to you again.
+Understand that, sir. Our acquaintance began to-day, and it will
+cease to-day. Good night to you. Come, Phyllis, me dear. Mrs. Ukridge,
+good night."
+
+Mr. Chase, when he spoke of four-point-seven guns, had known what he
+was talking about.
+
+
+
+
+DIES IRAE
+
+IX
+
+
+Why is it, I wonder, that stories of Retribution calling at the wrong
+address strike us as funny instead of pathetic? I myself had been
+amused by them many a time. In a book which I had just read, a shop
+woman, being vexed with an omnibus conductor, had thrown a
+superannuated orange at him. It had found its billet not on him, but
+on a perfectly inoffensive spectator. The missile, we are told, "'it a
+young copper full in the hyeball." I had enjoyed this when I read it,
+but now that fate had arranged a precisely similar situation, with
+myself in the role of the young copper, the fun of the thing appealed
+to me not at all.
+
+It was Ukridge who was to blame for the professor's regrettable
+explosion and departure, and he ought by all laws of justice to have
+suffered for it. As it was, I was the only person materially affected.
+It did not matter to Ukridge. He did not care twopence one way or the
+other. If the professor were friendly, he was willing to talk to him
+by the hour on any subject, pleasant or unpleasant. If, on the other
+hand, he wished to have nothing more to do with us, it did not worry
+him. He was content to let him go. Ukridge was a self-sufficing
+person.
+
+But to me it was a serious matter. More than serious. If I have done
+my work as historian with any adequate degree of skill, the reader
+should have gathered by this time the state of my feelings.
+
+My love had grown with the days. Mr. J. Holt Schooling, or somebody
+else with a taste for juggling with figures, might write a very
+readable page or so of statistics in connection with the growth of
+love in the heart of a man. In some cases it is, I believe, slow. In
+my own I can only say that Jack's beanstalk was a backward plant in
+comparison. It is true that we had not seen a great deal of one
+another, and that, when we had met, our interviews had been brief and
+our conversation conventional; but it is the intervals between the
+meetings that do the real damage. Absence, as the poet neatly remarks,
+makes the heart grow fonder. And now, thanks to Ukridge's amazing
+idiocy, a barrier had been thrust between us. As if the business of
+fishing for a girl's heart were not sufficiently difficult and
+delicate without the addition of needless obstacles! It was terrible
+to have to reestablish myself in the good graces of the professor
+before I could so much as begin to dream of Phyllis.
+
+Ukridge gave me no balm.
+
+"Well, after all," he said, when I pointed out to him quietly but
+plainly my opinion of his tactlessness, "what does it matter? There
+are other people in the world besides the old buffer. And we haven't
+time to waste making friends, as a matter of fact. The farm ought to
+keep us busy. I've noticed, Garny, old boy, that you haven't seemed
+such a whale for work lately as you might be. You must buckle to, old
+horse. We are at a critical stage. On our work now depends the success
+of the speculation. Look at those cocks. They're always fighting.
+Fling a stone at them. What's the matter with you? Can't get the novel
+off your chest, what? You take my tip, and give your mind a rest.
+Nothing like manual labor for clearing the brain. All the doctors say
+so. Those coops ought to be painted to-day or to-morrow. Mind you, I
+think old Derrick would be all right if one persevered--"
+
+"And didn't call him a fat old buffer, and contradict everything he
+said and spoil all his stories by breaking in with chestnuts of your
+own in the middle," I interrupted with bitterness.
+
+"Oh, rot, old boy! He didn't mind being called a fat old buffer. You
+keep harping on that. A man likes one to be chatty with him. What was
+the matter with old Derrick was a touch of liver. You should have
+stopped him taking that cheese. I say, old man, just fling another
+stone at those cocks, will you? They'll eat one another."
+
+I had hoped, fearing the while that there was not much chance of such
+a thing happening, that the professor might get over his feeling of
+injury during the night, and be as friendly as ever next day. But he
+was evidently a man who had no objection whatever to letting the sun
+go down upon his wrath, for, when I met him on the beach the
+following morning, he cut me in the most uncompromising fashion.
+
+Phyllis was with him at the time, and also another girl who was, I
+supposed from the strong likeness between them, her sister. She had
+the same soft mass of brown hair. But to me she appeared almost
+commonplace in comparison.
+
+It is never pleasant to be cut dead. It produces the same sort of
+feeling as is experienced when one treads on nothing where one
+imagined a stair to be. In the present instance the pang was mitigated
+to a certain extent--not largely--by the fact that Phyllis looked at
+me. She did not move her head, and I could not have declared
+positively that she moved her eyes; but nevertheless she certainly
+looked at me. It was something. She seemed to say that duty compelled
+her to follow her father's lead, and that the act must not be taken as
+evidence of any personal animus.
+
+That, at least, was how I read off the message.
+
+Two days later I met Mr. Chase in the village.
+
+"Halloo! so you're back," I said.
+
+"You've discovered my secret," said he. "Will you have a cigar or a
+cocoanut?"
+
+There was a pause.
+
+"Trouble, I hear, while I was away," he said.
+
+I nodded.
+
+"The man I live with, Ukridge, did it. Touched on the Irish question."
+
+"Home rule?"
+
+"He mentioned it among other things."
+
+"And the professor went off?"
+
+"Like a bomb."
+
+"He would. It's a pity."
+
+I agreed.
+
+I am glad to say that I suppressed the desire to ask him to use his
+influence, if any, with Professor Derrick to effect a reconciliation.
+I felt that I must play the game.
+
+"I ought not to be speaking to you, you know," said Mr. Chase. "You're
+under arrest."
+
+"He's still--" I stopped for a word.
+
+"Very much so. I'll do what I can."
+
+"It's very good of you."
+
+"But the time is not yet ripe. He may be said at present to be
+simmering down."
+
+"I see. Thanks. Good-by."
+
+"So long."
+
+And Mr. Chase walked on with long strides to the Cob.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The days passed slowly. I saw nothing more of Phyllis or her sister.
+The professor I met once or twice on the links. I had taken earnestly
+to golf in this time of stress. Golf, it has been said, is the game of
+disappointed lovers. On the other hand, it has further been pointed
+out that it does not follow that, because a man is a failure as a
+lover, he will be any good at all on the links. My game was distinctly
+poor at first. But a round or two put me back into my proper form,
+which is fair. The professor's demeanor at these accidental meetings
+on the links was a faithful reproduction of his attitude on the beach.
+Only by a studied imitation of the absolute stranger did he show that
+he had observed my presence.
+
+Once or twice after dinner, when Ukridge was smoking one of his
+special cigars while Mrs. Ukridge petted Edwin (now moving in society
+once more, and in his right mind), I walked out across the fields
+through the cool summer night till I came to the hedge that shut off
+the Derricks' grounds. Not the hedge through which I had made my first
+entrance, but another, lower, and nearer the house. Standing there
+under the shade of a tree I could see the lighted windows of the
+drawing-room.
+
+Generally there was music inside, and, the windows being opened on
+account of the warmth of the night, I was able to make myself a little
+more miserable by hearing Phyllis sing. It deepened the feeling of
+banishment.
+
+I shall never forget those furtive visits. The intense stillness of
+the night, broken by an occasional rustling in the grass or the hedge;
+the smell of the flowers in the garden beyond; the distant drone of
+the sea.
+
+    "God makes sech nights, all white and still,
+      Fur'z you can look and listen."
+
+Another day had generally begun before I moved from my hiding place,
+and started for home, surprised to find my limbs stiff and my clothes
+bathed with dew.
+
+Life seemed a poor institution during these days.
+
+
+
+
+I ENLIST A MINION'S SERVICES
+
+X
+
+
+It would be interesting to know to what extent the work of authors is
+influenced by their private affairs. If life is flowing smoothly for
+them, are the novels they write in that period of content colored with
+optimism? And if things are running crosswise, do they work off the
+resultant gloom on their faithful public? If, for instance, Mr. W. W.
+Jacobs had toothache, would he write like Mr. Hall Caine? If Maxim
+Gorky were invited to lunch by the Czar, would he sit down and dash
+off a trifle in the vein of Mr. Dooley? Probably great authors have
+the power of detaching their writing self from their living, workaday
+self. For my own part, the frame of mind in which I now found myself
+completely altered the scheme of my novel. I had designed it as a
+light-comedy effort. Here and there a page or two to steady the
+reader, and show him what I could do in the way of pathos if I cared
+to try; but in the main a thing of sunshine and laughter. But now
+great slabs of gloom began to work themselves into the scheme of it.
+Characters whom I had hitherto looked upon as altogether robust
+developed fatal illnesses. A magnificent despondency became the
+keynote of the book. Instead of marrying, my hero and heroine had a
+big scene in the last chapter, at the end of which she informed him
+that she was already secretly wedded to another, a man with whom she
+had not even a sporting chance of being happy. I could see myself
+correcting proofs made pulpy by the tears of emotional printers.
+
+It would not do. I felt that I must make a determined effort to shake
+off my depression. More than ever the need for conciliating the
+professor was borne in upon me. Day and night I spurred my brain to
+think of some suitable means of engineering a reconciliation.
+
+In the meantime I worked hard among the fowls, drove furiously on the
+links, and swam about the harbor when the affairs of the farm did not
+require my attention.
+
+Things were not going very well on our model chicken farm. Little
+accidents marred the harmony of life in the fowl run. On one occasion
+a hen fell into a pot of tar, and came out an unspeakable object.
+Chickens kept straying into the wrong coops, and, in accordance with
+fowl etiquette, were promptly pecked to death by the resident. Edwin
+murdered a couple of Wyandottes, and was only saved from execution by
+the tears of Mrs. Ukridge.
+
+In spite of these occurrences, however, his buoyant optimism never
+deserted Ukridge. They were incidents, annoying, but in no way
+affecting the prosperity of the farm.
+
+"After all," he said, "what's one bird more or less? Yes, I know I was
+angry when that beast of a cat lunched off those two, but that was
+more for the principle of the thing. I'm not going to pay large sums
+for chickens so that a beastly cat can lunch well. Still, we've plenty
+left, and the eggs are coming in better now, though we've a deal of
+leeway to make up yet in that line. I got a letter from Whiteley's
+this morning asking when my first consignment was to arrive. You know,
+these people make a mistake in hurrying a man. It annoys him. It
+irritates him. When we really get going, Garny, my boy, I shall drop
+Whiteley's. I shall cut them out of my list, and send my eggs to their
+trade rivals. They shall have a sharp lesson. It's a little hard. Here
+am I, worked to death looking after things down here, and these men
+have the impertinence to bother me about their wretched business!"
+
+[Illustration: Things were not going very well on our model chicken
+farm.]
+
+It was on the morning after this that I heard him calling me in a
+voice in which I detected agitation. I was strolling about the
+paddock, as was my habit after breakfast, thinking about Phyllis and
+my wretched novel. I had just framed a more than usually murky scene
+for use in the earlier part of the book, when Ukridge shouted to me
+from the fowl run.
+
+"Garnet, come here," he cried, "I want you to see the most astounding
+thing."
+
+I joined him.
+
+"What's the matter?" I asked.
+
+"Blest if I know. Look at those chickens. They've been doing that for
+the last half hour."
+
+I inspected the chickens. There was certainly something the matter
+with them. They were yawning broadly, as if we bored them. They stood
+about singly and in groups, opening and shutting their beaks. It was
+an uncanny spectacle.
+
+"What's the matter with them?"
+
+"It looks to me," I said, "as if they were tired of life. They seem
+hipped."
+
+"Oh, do look at that poor little brown one by the coop," said Mrs.
+Ukridge sympathetically, "I'm sure it's not well. See, it's lying
+down. What _can_ be the matter with it?"
+
+"Can a chicken get a fit of the blues?" I asked. "Because, if so,
+that's what they've got. I never saw a more bored-looking lot of
+birds."
+
+"I'll tell you what we'll do," said Ukridge. "We'll ask Beale. He once
+lived with an aunt who kept fowls. He'll know all about it. Beale!"
+
+No answer.
+
+"_Beale_!!"
+
+A sturdy form in shirt sleeves appeared through the bushes, carrying
+a boot. We seemed to have interrupted him in the act of cleaning it.
+
+"Beale, you know about fowls. What's the matter with these chickens?"
+
+The hired retainer examined the _blase_ birds with a wooden expression
+on his face.
+
+"Well?" said Ukridge.
+
+"The 'ole thing 'ere," said the hired retainer, "is these 'ere fowls
+have bin and got the roop."
+
+I had never heard of the disease before, but it sounded quite
+horrifying.
+
+"Is that what makes them yawn like that?" said Mrs. Ukridge.
+
+"Yes, ma'am."
+
+"Poor things!"
+
+"Yes, ma'am."
+
+"And have they all got it?"
+
+"Yes, ma'am."
+
+"What ought we to do?" asked Ukridge.
+
+The hired retainer perpended.
+
+"Well, my aunt, sir, when 'er fowls 'ad the roop, she give them snuff.
+Give them snuff, she did," he repeated with relish, "every morning."
+
+"Snuff!" said Mrs. Ukridge.
+
+"Yes, ma'am. She give them snuff till their eyes bubbled."
+
+Mrs. Ukridge uttered a faint squeak at this vivid piece of word
+painting.
+
+"And did it cure them?" asked Ukridge.
+
+"No, sir," responded the expert soothingly. "They died."
+
+"Oh, go away, Beale, and clean your beastly boots," said Ukridge.
+"You're no use. Wait a minute. Who would know about this infernal roop
+thing? One of those farmer chaps would, I suppose. Beale, go off to
+farmer Leigh at Up Lyme, and give him my compliments, and ask him what
+he does when his fowls get the roop."
+
+"Yes, sir."
+
+"No, I'll go, Ukridge," I said, "I want some exercise."
+
+I whistled to Bob, who was investigating a mole heap in the paddock,
+and set off to consult farmer Leigh. He had sold us some fowls shortly
+after our arrival, so might be expected to feel a kindly interest in
+their ailing families.
+
+The path to Up Lyme lies across deep-grassed meadows. At intervals it
+passes over a stream by means of foot bridges. The stream curls
+through the meadows like a snake.
+
+And at the first of these bridges I met Phyllis.
+
+I came upon her quite suddenly. The other end of the bridge was hidden
+from my view. I could hear somebody coming through the grass, but not
+till I was on the bridge did I see who it was. We reached the bridge
+simultaneously. She was alone. She carried a sketching block. All
+nice girls sketch a little.
+
+There was room for one alone on the foot bridge, and I drew back to
+let her pass.
+
+As it is the privilege of woman to make the first sign of recognition,
+I said nothing. I merely lifted my hat in a noncommitting fashion.
+
+"Are you going to cut me, I wonder?" I said to myself.
+
+She answered the unspoken question as I hoped it would be answered.
+
+"Mr. Garnet," she said, stopping at the end of the bridge.
+
+"Miss Derrick?"
+
+"I couldn't tell you so before, but I am so sorry this has happened."
+
+"You are very kind," I said, realizing as I said it the miserable
+inadequacy of the English language. At a crisis when I would have
+given a month's income to have said something neat, epigrammatic,
+suggestive, yet withal courteous and respectful, I could only find a
+hackneyed, unenthusiastic phrase which I should have used in accepting
+an invitation from a bore to lunch with him at his club.
+
+"Of course you understand my friends must be my father's friends."
+
+"Yes," I said gloomily, "I suppose so."
+
+"So you must not think me rude if I--I--"
+
+"Cut me," said I with masculine coarseness.
+
+"Don't seem to see you," said she, with feminine delicacy, "when I am
+with my father. You will understand?"
+
+"I shall understand."
+
+"You see"--she smiled--"you are under arrest, as Tom says."
+
+Tom!
+
+"I see," I said.
+
+"Good-by."
+
+"Good-by."
+
+I watched her out of sight, and went on to interview Mr. Leigh.
+
+We had a long and intensely uninteresting conversation about the
+maladies to which chickens are subject. He was verbose and
+reminiscent. He took me over his farm, pointing out as he went
+Dorkings and Cochin Chinas which he had cured of diseases generally
+fatal, with, as far as I could gather, Christian Science principles.
+
+I left at last with instructions to paint the throats of the stricken
+birds with turpentine--a task imagination boggled at, and one which I
+proposed to leave exclusively to Ukridge and the hired retainer. As I
+had a slight headache, a visit to the Cob would, I thought, do me
+good. I had missed my bath that morning, and was in need of a breath
+of sea air.
+
+It was high tide, and there was deep water on three sides of the Cob.
+
+In a small boat in the offing Professor Derrick appeared, fishing. I
+had seen him engaged in this pursuit once or twice before. His only
+companion was a gigantic boatman, by name Harry Hawk.
+
+I sat on the seat at the end of the Cob, and watched the professor. It
+was an instructive sight, an object lesson to those who hold that
+optimism has died out of the race. I had never seen him catch a fish.
+He did not look to me as if he were at all likely to catch a fish. Yet
+he persevered.
+
+There are few things more restful than to watch some one else busy
+under a warm sun. As I sat there, my mind ranged idly over large
+subjects and small. I thought of love and chicken farming. I mused on
+the immortality of the soul. In the end I always returned to the
+professor. Sitting, as I did, with my back to the beach, I could see
+nothing but his boat. It had the ocean to itself.
+
+I began to ponder over the professor. I wondered dreamily if he were
+very hot. I tried to picture his boyhood. I speculated on his future,
+and the pleasure he extracted from life.
+
+It was only when I heard him call out to Hawk to be careful, when a
+movement on the part of that oarsman set the boat rocking, that I
+began to weave romances round him in which I myself figured.
+
+But, once started, I progressed rapidly. I imagined a sudden upset.
+Professor struggling in water. Myself (heroically): "Courage! I'm
+coming!" A few rapid strokes. Saved! Sequel: A subdued professor,
+dripping salt water and tears of gratitude, urging me to become his
+son-in-law. That sort of thing happened in fiction. It was a shame
+that it should not happen in real life. In my hot youth I once had
+seven stories in seven weekly penny papers in the same month all
+dealing with a situation of the kind. Only the details differed. In
+"Not Really a Coward," Vincent Devereux had rescued the earl's
+daughter from a fire, whereas in "Hilda's Hero" it was the peppery old
+father whom Tom Slingsby saved. Singularly enough, from drowning. In
+other words, I, a very mediocre scribbler, had effected seven times in
+a single month what the powers of the universe could not manage once,
+even on the smallest scale.
+
+I was a little annoyed with the powers of the universe.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+It was at precisely three minutes to twelve--for I had just consulted
+my watch--that the great idea surged into my brain. At four minutes to
+twelve I had been grumbling impotently at Providence. By two minutes
+to twelve I had determined upon a manly and independent course of
+action.
+
+Briefly, it was this. Since dramatic accident and rescue would not
+happen of its own accord, I would arrange one for myself. Hawk looked
+to me the sort of man who would do anything in a friendly way for a
+few shillings.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+That afternoon I interviewed Mr. Hawk at the Net and Mackerel.
+
+"Hawk," I said to him darkly, over a mystic and conspirator-like pot,
+"I want you, the next time you take Professor Derrick out
+fishing"--here I glanced round, to make sure that we were not
+overheard--"to upset him."
+
+His astonished face rose slowly from the rim of the pot, like a full
+moon.
+
+"What 'ud I do that for?" he gasped.
+
+"Five shillings, I hope," said I; "but I am prepared to go to ten."
+
+He gurgled.
+
+I argued with the man. I was eloquent, but at the same time concise.
+My choice of words was superb. I crystallized my ideas into pithy
+sentences which a child could have understood.
+
+At the end of half an hour he had grasped all the salient points of
+the scheme. Also he imagined that I wished the professor upset by way
+of a practical joke. He gave me to understand that this was the type
+of humor which was to be expected from a gentleman from London. I am
+afraid he must at one period of his career have lived at one of those
+watering places to which trippers congregate. He did not seem to think
+highly of the Londoner.
+
+I let it rest at that. I could not give my true reason, and this
+served as well as any.
+
+At the last moment he recollected that he, too, would get wet when the
+accident took place, and raised his price to a sovereign.
+
+A mercenary man. It is painful to see how rapidly the old simple
+spirit is dying out in rural districts. Twenty years ago a fisherman
+would have been charmed to do a little job like that for a shilling.
+
+
+
+
+THE BRAVE PRESERVER
+
+XI
+
+
+I could have wished, during the next few days, that Mr. Harry Hawk's
+attitude toward myself had not been so unctuously confidential and
+mysterious. It was unnecessary, in my opinion, for him to grin
+meaningly whenever he met me in the street. His sly wink when we
+passed each other on the Cob struck me as in indifferent taste. The
+thing had been definitely arranged (half down and half when it was
+over), and there was no need for any cloak and dark-lantern effects. I
+objected strongly to being treated as the villain of a melodrama. I
+was merely an ordinary well-meaning man, forced by circumstances into
+doing the work of Providence. Mr. Hawk's demeanor seemed to say:
+
+"We are two reckless scoundrels, but bless you, _I_ won't give away
+your guilty secret."
+
+The climax came one morning as I was going along the street toward the
+beach. I was passing a dark doorway, when out shimmered Mr. Hawk as if
+he had been a specter instead of the most substantial man within a
+radius of ten miles.
+
+"St!" he whispered.
+
+"Now look here, Hawk," I said wrathfully, for the start he had given
+me had made me bite my tongue, "this has got to stop. I refuse to be
+haunted in this way. What is it now?"
+
+"Mr. Derrick goes out this morning, zur."
+
+"Thank goodness for that," I said. "Get it over this morning, then,
+without fail. I couldn't stand another day of this."
+
+I went on to the Cob, where I sat down. I was excited. Deeds of great
+import must shortly be done. I felt a little nervous. It would never
+do to bungle the thing. Suppose by some accident I were to drown the
+professor, or suppose that, after all, he contented himself with a
+mere formal expression of thanks and refused to let bygones be
+bygones. These things did not bear thinking of.
+
+I got up and began to pace restlessly to and fro.
+
+Presently from the farther end of the harbor there put off Mr. Hawk's
+boat, bearing its precious cargo. My mouth became dry with excitement.
+
+Very slowly Mr. Hawk pulled round the end of the Cob, coming to a
+standstill some dozen yards from where I was performing my beat. It
+was evidently here that the scene of the gallant rescue had been
+fixed.
+
+My eyes were glued upon Mr. Hawk's broad back. The boat lay almost
+motionless on the water. I had never seen the sea smoother.
+
+It seemed as if this perfect calm might continue for ever. Mr. Hawk
+made no movement. Then suddenly the whole scene changed to one of vast
+activity. I heard Mr. Hawk utter a hoarse cry, and saw him plunge
+violently in his seat. The professor turned half round, and I caught
+sight of his indignant face, pink with emotion. Then the scene changed
+again with the rapidity of a dissolving view. I saw Mr. Hawk give
+another plunge, and the next moment the boat was upside down in the
+water, and I was shooting head foremost to the bottom, oppressed with
+the indescribably clammy sensation which comes when one's clothes are
+thoroughly wet.
+
+I rose to the surface close to the upturned boat. The first sight I
+saw was the spluttering face of Mr. Hawk. I ignored him and swam to
+where the professor's head bobbed on the waters.
+
+"Keep cool," I said. A silly remark in the circumstances.
+
+He was swimming energetically but unskillfully. In his shore clothes
+it would have taken him at least a week to struggle to land.
+
+I knew all about saving people from drowning. We used to practice it
+with a dummy in the swimming bath at school. I attacked him from the
+rear and got a good grip of him by the shoulders. I then swam on my
+back in the direction of land, and beached him at the feet of an
+admiring crowd. I had thought of putting him under once or twice just
+to show him he was being rescued, but decided against such a course as
+needlessly realistic. As it was, I fancy he had swallowed two or three
+hearty draughts of sea water.
+
+The crowd was enthusiastic.
+
+"Brave young feller," said somebody.
+
+I blushed. This was fame.
+
+"Jumped in, he did, sure enough, an' saved the gentleman!"
+
+"Be the old soul drownded?"
+
+"That girt fule, 'Arry 'Awk!"
+
+I was sorry for Mr. Hawk. Popular opinion, in which the professor
+wrathfully joined, was against him. I could not help thinking that my
+fellow-conspirator did well to keep out of it all. He was now sitting
+in the boat, which he had restored to its normal position, baling
+pensively with an old tin can. To satire from the shore he paid no
+attention.
+
+The professor stood up and stretched out his hand to me.
+
+I grasped it.
+
+"Mr. Garnet," he said, for all the world as if he had been the father
+of the heroine of "Hilda's Hero," "we parted recently in anger. Let me
+thank you for your gallant conduct, and hope that bygones will be
+bygones."
+
+[Illustration: "Mr. Garnet," he said, "we parted recently in anger. I
+hope that bygones will be bygones."]
+
+Like Mr. Samuel Weller, I liked his conversation much. It was "werry
+pretty."
+
+I came out strong. I continued to hold his hand. The crowd raised a
+sympathetic cheer.
+
+I said:
+
+"Professor, the fault was mine. Show that you have forgiven me by
+coming up to the farm and putting on something dry."
+
+"An excellent idea, me boy. I _am_ a little wet."
+
+We walked briskly up the hill to the farm. Ukridge met us at the gate.
+
+He diagnosed the situation rapidly.
+
+"You're all wet," he said.
+
+I admitted it.
+
+"Professor Derrick has had an unfortunate boating accident," I
+explained.
+
+"And Mr. Garnet heroically dived in, in all his clothes, and saved me
+life," broke in the professor. "A hero, sir. _A-choo!_"
+
+"You're catching cold, old horse," said Ukridge, all friendliness and
+concern, his little differences with the professor having vanished
+like thawed snow. "This'll never do. Come upstairs and get into
+something of Garnet's. My own toggery wouldn't fit, what? Come along,
+come along. I'll get you some hot water. Mrs. Beale--Mrs. _Beale_! We
+want a large can of hot water. At once. What? Yes, immediately. What?
+Very well, then, as soon as you can. Now, then, Garny, my boy, out
+with the duds. What do you think of this, now, professor? A sweetly
+pretty thing in gray flannel. Here's a shirt. Get out of that wet
+toggery, and Mrs. Beale shall dry it. Don't attempt to tell me about
+it till you've changed. Socks? Socks forward. Show socks. Here you
+are. Coat? Try this blazer. That's right. That's right."
+
+He bustled about till the professor was clothed, then marched him
+downstairs and gave him a cigar.
+
+"Now, what's all this? What happened?"
+
+The professor explained. He was severe in his narration upon the
+unlucky Mr. Hawk.
+
+"I was fishing, Mr. Ukridge, with me back turned, when I felt the boat
+rock violently from one side to the other to such an extent that I
+nearly lost me equilibrium. And then the boat upset. The man's a fool,
+sir. I could not see what had happened, my back being turned, as I
+say."
+
+"Garnet must have seen. What happened, Marmaduke?"
+
+I tried to smooth things over for Mr. Hawk.
+
+"It was very sudden," I said. "It seemed to me as if the man had got
+an attack of cramp. That would account for it. He has the reputation
+of being a most sober and trustworthy fellow."
+
+"Never trust that sort of man," said Ukridge. "They are always the
+worst. It's plain to me that this man was beastly drunk, and upset the
+boat while trying to do a dance."
+
+The professor was in the best of tempers, and I worked strenuously to
+keep him so. My scheme had been so successful that its iniquity did
+not worry me. I have noticed that this is usually the case in matters
+of this kind. It is the bungled crime that brings remorse.
+
+"We must go round the links together one of these days, Mr. Garnet,"
+said the professor. "I have noticed you there on several occasions,
+playing a strong game. I have lately taken to using a Schenectady
+putter. It is wonderful what a difference it makes."
+
+Golf is a great bond of union. We wandered about the grounds
+discussing the game, the _entente cordiale_ growing more firmly
+established every moment.
+
+"We must certainly arrange a meeting," concluded the professor. "I
+shall be interested to see how we stand with regard to one another. I
+have improved my game considerably since I have been down
+here--considerably."
+
+"My only feat worthy of mention since I started the game," I said,
+"has been to halve a round with Angus McLurkin at St. Andrew's."
+
+"_The_ McLurkin?" asked the professor, impressed.
+
+"Yes. But it was one of his very off days, I fancy. He must have had
+gout, or something. And I have certainly never played so well since."
+
+"Still--" said the professor. "Yes, we must really arrange to meet."
+
+With Ukridge, who was in one of his less tactless moods, he became
+very friendly.
+
+Ukridge's ready agreement with his strictures on the erring Hawk had a
+great deal to do with this. When a man has a grievance he feels drawn
+to those who will hear him patiently and sympathize. Ukridge was all
+sympathy.
+
+"The man is an unprincipled scoundrel," he said, "and should be torn
+limb from limb. Take my advice, Cholmondeley, and don't go out with
+him again. Show him that you are not a man to be trifled with. The
+spilled child dreads the water, what? Human life isn't safe with such
+men as Hawk roaming about."
+
+"You are perfectly right, sir. The man can have no defense. I shall
+not employ him again."
+
+I felt more than a little guilty while listening to this duet on the
+subject of the man whom I had lured from the straight and narrow
+path. But my attempts at excusing him were ill received. Indeed, the
+professor showed such distinct signs of becoming heated that I
+abandoned my fellow-conspirator to his fate with extreme promptness.
+After all, an addition to the stipulated reward--one of these
+days--would compensate him for any loss which he might sustain from
+the withdrawal of the professor's custom. Mr. Harry Hawk was in good
+enough case. I would see that he did not suffer.
+
+Filled with these philanthropic feelings, I turned once more to talk
+with the professor of niblicks and approach shots and holes done in
+three without a brassy. We were a merry party at lunch--a lunch,
+fortunately, in Mrs. Beale's best vein, consisting of a roast chicken
+and sweets. Chicken had figured somewhat frequently of late on our
+daily bill of fare.
+
+We saw the professor off the premises in his dried clothes, and I
+turned back to put the fowls to bed in a happier frame of mind than I
+had known for a long time. I whistled rag-time airs as I worked.
+
+"Rum old buffer," said Ukridge meditatively. "My goodness, I should
+have liked to see him in the water. Why do I miss these good things?"
+
+
+
+
+SOME EMOTIONS
+
+XII
+
+
+The fame which came to me through that gallant rescue was a little
+embarrassing. I was a marked man. Did I walk through the village,
+heads emerged from windows, and eyes followed me out of sight. Did I
+sit on the beach, groups formed behind me and watched in silent
+admiration. I was the man of the moment.
+
+"If we'd wanted an advertisement for the farm," said Ukridge on one of
+these occasions, "we couldn't have had a better one than you, Garny,
+my boy. You have brought us three distinct orders for eggs during the
+last week. And I'll tell you what it is, we need all the orders we
+can get that'll bring us in ready money. The farm is in a critical
+condition, Marmaduke. The coffers are low, decidedly low. And I'll
+tell you another thing. I'm getting precious tired of living on
+nothing but chicken and eggs. So's Millie, though she doesn't say so."
+
+"So am I," I said, "and I don't feel like imitating your wife's proud
+reserve. I never want to see a chicken again except alive."
+
+For the last week monotony had been the keynote of our commissariat.
+We had cold chicken and eggs for breakfast, boiled chicken and eggs
+for lunch, and roast chicken and eggs for dinner. Meals became a
+nuisance, and Mrs. Beale complained bitterly that we did not give her
+a chance. She was a cook who would have graced an alderman's house,
+and served up noble dinners for gourmets, and here she was in this
+remote corner of the world ringing the changes on boiled chicken and
+roast chicken and boiled eggs and poached eggs. Mr. Whistler, set to
+paint signboards for public houses, might have felt the same restless
+discontent. As for her husband, the hired retainer, he took life as
+tranquilly as ever, and seemed to regard the whole thing as the most
+exhilarating farce he had ever been in. I think he looked on Ukridge
+as an amiable lunatic, and was content to rough it a little in order
+to enjoy the privilege of observing his movements. He made no
+complaints of the food. When a man has supported life for a number of
+years on incessant army beef, the monotony of daily chicken and eggs
+scarcely strikes him.
+
+"The fact is," said Ukridge, "these tradesmen round here seem to be a
+sordid, suspicious lot. They clamor for money."
+
+He mentioned a few examples. Vickers, the butcher, had been the first
+to strike, with the remark that he would like to see the color of Mr.
+Ukridge's money before supplying further joints. Dawlish, the grocer,
+had expressed almost exactly similar sentiments two days later, and
+the ranks of these passive resisters had been receiving fresh recruits
+ever since. To a man the tradesmen of Lyme Regis seemed as deficient
+in simple faith as they were in Norman blood.
+
+"Can't you pay some of them a little on account?" I suggested. "It
+would set them going again."
+
+"My dear old man," said Ukridge impressively, "we need every penny of
+ready money we can raise for the farm. The place simply eats money.
+That infernal roop let us in for I don't know what."
+
+That insidious epidemic had indeed proved costly. We had painted the
+throats of the chickens with the best turpentine--at least, Ukridge
+and Beale had--but in spite of their efforts dozens had died, and we
+had been obliged to sink much more money than was pleasant in
+restocking the run.
+
+"No," said Ukridge, summing up, "these men must wait. We can't help
+their troubles. Why, good gracious, it isn't as if they'd been waiting
+for the money long. We've not been down here much over a month. I
+never heard such a scandalous thing. 'Pon my word, I've a good mind to
+go round and have a straight talk with one or two of them. I come and
+settle down here, and stimulate trade, and give them large orders, and
+they worry me with bills when they know I'm up to my eyes in work,
+looking after the fowls. One can't attend to everything. This business
+is just now at its most crucial point. It would be fatal to pay any
+attention to anything else with things as they are. These scoundrels
+will get paid all in good time."
+
+It is a peculiarity of situations of this kind that the ideas of
+debtor and creditor as to what constitutes good time never coincide.
+
+I am afraid that, despite the urgent need for strict attention to
+business, I was inclined to neglect my duties about this time. I had
+got into the habit of wandering off, either to the links, where I
+generally found the professor and sometimes Phyllis, or on long walks
+by myself. There was one particular walk, along the Ware cliff,
+through some of the most beautiful scenery I have ever set eyes on,
+which more than any other suited my mood. I would work my way through
+the woods till I came to a small clearing on the very edge of the
+cliff. There I would sit by the hour. Somehow I found that my ideas
+flowed more readily in that spot than in any other. My novel was
+taking shape. It was to be called, by the way, if it ever won through
+to the goal of a title, "The Brown-haired Girl."
+
+I had not been inside the professor's grounds since the occasion when
+I had gone in through the boxwood hedge. But on the afternoon
+following my financial conversation with Ukridge I made my way thither
+after a toilet which, from its length, should have produced better
+results than it did.
+
+Not for four whole days had I caught so much as a glimpse of Phyllis.
+I had been to the links three times, and had met the professor twice,
+but on both occasions she had been absent. I had not had the courage
+to ask after her. I had an absurd idea that my voice or my manner
+would betray me in some way.
+
+The professor was not at home. Nor was Mr. Chase. Nor was Miss Norah
+Derrick, the lady I had met on the beach with the professor. Miss
+Phyllis, said the maid, was in the garden.
+
+I went into the garden. She was sitting under the cedar by the tennis
+lawn, reading. She looked up as I approached.
+
+To walk any distance under observation is one of the most trying
+things I know. I advanced in bad order, hoping that my hands did not
+really look as big as they felt. The same remark applied to my feet.
+In emergencies of this kind a diffident man could very well dispense
+with extremities. I should have liked to be wheeled up in a bath
+chair.
+
+I said it was a lovely afternoon; after which there was a lull in the
+conversation. I was filled with a horrid fear that I was boring her. I
+had probably arrived at the very moment when she was most interested
+in her book. She must, I thought, even now be regarding me as a
+nuisance, and was probably rehearsing bitter things to say to the
+servant for not having had the sense to explain that she was out.
+
+"I--er--called in the hope of seeing Professor Derrick," I said.
+
+"You would find him on the links," she replied. It seemed to me that
+she spoke wistfully.
+
+"Oh, it--it doesn't matter," I said. "It wasn't anything important."
+
+This was true. If the professor had appeared then and there, I should
+have found it difficult to think of anything to say to him which would
+have accounted for my anxiety to see him.
+
+We paused again.
+
+"How are the chickens, Mr. Garnet?" said she.
+
+The situation was saved. Conversationally, I am like a clockwork toy.
+I have to be set going. On the affairs of the farm I could speak
+fluently. I sketched for her the progress we had made since her visit.
+I was humorous concerning roop, epigrammatic on the subject of the
+hired retainer and Edwin.
+
+"Then the cat did come down from the chimney?" said Phyllis.
+
+We both laughed, and--I can answer for myself--felt the better for it.
+
+"He came down next day," I said, "and made an excellent lunch off one
+of our best fowls. He also killed another, and only just escaped death
+himself at the hands of Ukridge."
+
+"Mr. Ukridge doesn't like him, does he?"
+
+"If he does, he dissembles his love. Edwin is Mrs. Ukridge's pet. He
+is the only subject on which they disagree. Edwin is certainly in the
+way on a chicken farm. He has got over his fear of Bob, and is now
+perfectly lawless. We have to keep a constant eye on him."
+
+"And have you had any success with the incubator? I love incubators. I
+have always wanted to have one of my own, but we have never kept
+fowls."
+
+"The incubator has not done all that it should have done," I said.
+"Ukridge looks after it, and I fancy his methods are not the right
+methods. I don't know if I have got the figures absolutely correct,
+but Ukridge reasons on these lines. He says you are supposed to keep
+the temperature up to a hundred and five degrees. I think he said a
+hundred and five. Then the eggs are supposed to hatch out in a week or
+so. He argues that you may just as well keep the temperature at
+seventy-two, and wait a fortnight for your chickens. I am certain
+there's a fallacy in the system somewhere, because we never seem to
+get as far as the chickens. But Ukridge says his theory is
+mathematically sound and he sticks to it."
+
+"Are you quite sure that the way you are doing it is the best way to
+manage a chicken farm?"
+
+"I should very much doubt it. I am a child in these matters. I had
+only seen a chicken in its wild state once or twice before we came
+down here. I had never dreamed of being an active assistant on a real
+farm. The whole thing began like Mr. George Ade's fable of the author.
+An author--myself--was sitting at his desk trying to turn out
+something that could be converted into breakfast food, when a friend
+came in and sat down on the table and told him to go right on and not
+mind him."
+
+"Did Mr. Ukridge do that?"
+
+"Very nearly that. He called at my rooms one beautiful morning when I
+was feeling desperately tired of London and overworked and dying for a
+holiday, and suggested that I should come to Lyme Regis with him and
+help him farm chickens. I have not regretted it."
+
+"It is a lovely place, isn't it?"
+
+"The loveliest I have ever seen. How charming your garden is."
+
+"Shall we go and look at it? You have not seen the whole of it."
+
+As she rose I saw her book, which she had laid face downward on the
+grass beside her. It was that same much-enduring copy of "The
+Maneuvers of Arthur." I was thrilled. This patient perseverance must
+surely mean something.
+
+She saw me looking at it.
+
+"Did you draw Pamela from anybody?" she asked suddenly.
+
+I was glad now that I had not done so. The wretched Pamela, once my
+pride, was for some reason unpopular with the only critic about whose
+opinion I cared, and had fallen accordingly from her pedestal.
+
+As we wandered down the gravel paths she gave me her opinion of the
+book. In the main it was appreciative. I shall always associate the
+scent of yellow lubin with the higher criticism.
+
+"Of course I don't know anything about writing books," she said.
+
+"Yes?" My tone implied, or I hoped it did, that she was an expert on
+books, and that if she was not it didn't matter.
+
+"But I don't think you do your heroines well. I have got 'The
+Outsider'--"
+
+(My other novel. Bastable & Kirby, six shillings. Satirical. All about
+society, of which I know less than I know about chicken farming.
+Slated by _Times_ and _Spectator_. Well received by the _Pelican_.)
+
+"--and," continued Phyllis, "Lady Maud is exactly the same as Pamela
+in 'The Maneuvers of Arthur.' I thought you must have drawn both
+characters from some one you knew."
+
+"No," I said; "no."
+
+"I am so glad," said Phyllis.
+
+And then neither of us seemed to have anything to say.
+
+My knees began to tremble. I realized that the moment had arrived when
+my fate must be put to the touch, and I feared that the moment was
+premature. We cannot arrange these things to suit ourselves. I knew
+that the time was not yet ripe, but the magic scent of the yellow
+lubin was too much for me.
+
+"Miss Derrick--" I said hoarsely.
+
+Phyllis was looking with more intentness than the attractions of the
+flower justified at a rose she held in her hand. The bees hummed in
+the lubin.
+
+"Miss Derrick--" I said, and stopped again.
+
+"I say, you people," said a cheerful voice, "tea is ready. Halloo,
+Garnet, how are you? That medal arrived yet from the humane society?"
+
+I spun round. Mr. Tom Chase was standing at the end of the path. I
+grinned a sickly grin.
+
+"Well, Tom," said Phyllis.
+
+And there was, I thought, just the faintest trace of annoyance in her
+voice.
+
+"I've been bathing," said Mr. Chase.
+
+"Oh," I replied. "And I wish," I added, "that you'd drowned yourself."
+
+But I added it silently to myself.
+
+
+
+
+TEA AND TENNIS
+
+XIII
+
+
+"Met the professor's late boatman on the Cob," said Mr. Chase,
+dissecting a chocolate cake.
+
+"Clumsy man," said Phyllis, "I hope he was ashamed of himself. I shall
+never forgive him for trying to drown papa."
+
+My heart bled for Mr. Henry Hawk, that modern martyr.
+
+"When I met him," said Tom Chase, "he looked as if he had been trying
+to drown his sorrow as well."
+
+"I knew he drank," said Phyllis severely, "the very first time I saw
+him."
+
+"You might have warned the professor," murmured Mr. Chase.
+
+"He couldn't have upset the boat if he had been sober."
+
+"You never know. He may have done it on purpose."
+
+"How absurd!"
+
+"Rather rough on the man, aren't you?" I said.
+
+"Merely a suggestion," continued Mr. Chase airily. "I've been reading
+sensational novels lately, and it seems to me that Hawk's cut out to
+be a minion. Probably some secret foe of the professor's bribed him."
+
+My heart stood still. Did he know, I wondered, and was this all a
+roundabout way of telling me that he knew?
+
+"The professor may be a member of an anarchist league, or something,
+and this is his punishment for refusing to assassinate the Kaiser."
+
+"Have another cup of tea, Tom, and stop talking nonsense."
+
+Mr. Chase handed in his cup.
+
+"What gave me the idea that the upset was done on purpose was this. I
+saw the whole thing from the Ware cliff. The spill looked to me just
+like dozens I had seen at Malta."
+
+"Why do they upset themselves on purpose at Malta particularly?"
+inquired Phyllis.
+
+"Listen carefully, my dear, and you'll know more about the ways of the
+navy that guards your coasts than you did before. When men are allowed
+on shore at Malta, the owner has a fancy to see them snugly on board
+again at a certain reasonable hour. After that hour any Maltese
+policeman who brings them aboard gets one sovereign, cash. But he has
+to do all the bringing part of it on his own. Consequence is, you see
+boats rowing out to the ship, carrying men who have overstayed their
+leave; and, when they get near enough, the able-bodied gentleman in
+custody jumps to his feet, upsets the boat, and swims to the gangway.
+The policemen, if they aren't drowned--they sometimes are--race him,
+and whichever gets there first wins. If it's the policeman, he gets
+his sovereign. If it's the sailor, he is considered to have arrived
+not in a state of custody, and gets off easier. What a judicious
+remark that was of the Governor of North Carolina to the Governor of
+South Carolina! Just one more cup, please, Phyllis."
+
+"But how does all that apply?" I asked, dry-mouthed.
+
+"Why, Hawk upset the professor just as those Maltese were upset.
+There's a patent way of doing it. Furthermore, by judicious
+questioning, I found that Hawk was once in the navy, and stationed at
+Malta. _Now_, who's going to drag in Sherlock Holmes?"
+
+"You don't really think--" I said, feeling like a criminal in the
+dock when the case is going against him.
+
+"I think friend Hawk has been reenacting the joys of his vanished
+youth, so to speak."
+
+"He ought to be prosecuted," said Phyllis, blazing with indignation.
+
+Alas, poor Hawk!
+
+"Nobody's safe with a man of that sort hiring out a boat."
+
+Oh, miserable Hawk!
+
+"But why on earth," I asked, as calmly as possible, "should he play a
+trick like that on Professor Derrick, Chase?"
+
+"Pure animal spirits, probably. Or he may, as I say, be a minion."
+
+I was hot all over.
+
+"I shall tell father that," said Phyllis in her most decided voice,
+"and see what he says. I don't wonder at the man taking to drink after
+doing such a thing."
+
+"I--I think you're making a mistake," I said.
+
+"I never make mistakes," Mr. Chase replied. "I am called Archibald the
+All Right, for I am infallible. I propose to keep a reflective eye
+upon the jovial Hawk."
+
+He helped himself to another section of the chocolate cake.
+
+"Haven't you finished yet, Tom?" inquired Phyllis. "I'm sure Mr.
+Garnet's getting tired of sitting talking here."
+
+I shot out a polite negative. Mr. Chase explained with his mouth full
+that he had by no means finished. Chocolate cake, it appeared, was the
+dream of his life. When at sea he was accustomed to lie awake o'
+nights thinking of it.
+
+"You don't seem to realize," he said, "that I have just come from a
+cruise on a torpedo boat. There was such a sea on, as a rule, that
+cooking operations were entirely suspended, and we lived on ham and
+sardines--without bread."
+
+"How horrible!"
+
+"On the other hand," added Mr. Chase philosophically, "it didn't
+matter much, because we were all ill most of the time."
+
+"Don't be nasty, Tom."
+
+"I was merely defending myself. I hope Mr. Hawk will be able to do as
+well when his turn comes. My aim, my dear Phyllis, is to show you in a
+series of impressionist pictures the sort of thing I have to go
+through when I'm not here. Then perhaps you won't rend me so savagely
+over a matter of five minutes' lateness for breakfast."
+
+"Five minutes! It was three quarters of an hour, and everything was
+simply frozen."
+
+"Quite right, too, in weather like this. You're a slave to convention,
+Phyllis. You think breakfast ought to be hot, so you always have it
+hot. On occasion I prefer mine cold. Mine is the truer wisdom. I have
+scoffed the better part, as the good Kipling has it. You can give the
+cook my compliments, Phyllis, and tell her--gently, for I don't wish
+the glad news to overwhelm her--that I enjoyed that cake. Say that I
+shall be glad to hear from her again. Care for a game of tennis,
+Garnet?"
+
+"What a pity Norah isn't here," said Phyllis. "We could have had a
+four."
+
+"But she is at present wasting her sweetness on the desert air of
+Yeovil. You had better sit out and watch us, Phyllis. Tennis in this
+sort of weather is no job for the delicately nurtured feminine. I will
+explain the finer points of my play as we go on. Look out particularly
+for the Doherty Back-handed Slosh. A winning stroke every time."
+
+We proceeded to the tennis court. I played with the sun in my eyes. I
+might, if I chose, emphasize that fact, and attribute my subsequent
+rout to it, adding, by way of solidifying the excuse, that I was
+playing in a strange court with a borrowed racket, and that my mind
+was preoccupied--firstly, with _l'affaire_ Hawk; secondly, and
+chiefly, with the gloomy thought that Phyllis and my opponent seemed
+to be on fiendishly good terms with each other. Their manner at tea
+had been almost that of an engaged couple. There was a thorough
+understanding between them. I will not, however, take refuge behind
+excuses. I admit, without qualifying the statement, that Mr. Chase was
+too good for me. I had always been under the impression that
+lieutenants in the royal navy were not brilliant at tennis. I had met
+them at various houses, but they had never shone conspicuously. They
+had played an earnest, unobtrusive game, and generally seemed glad
+when it was over. Mr. Chase was not of this sort. His service was
+bottled lightning. His returns behaved like jumping crackers. He won
+the first game in precisely four strokes. He served. I know now how
+soldiers feel under fire. The balls whistled at me like live things.
+Only once did I take the service with the full face of the racket, and
+then I seemed to be stopping a bullet. I returned it into the net.
+
+"Game," said Mr. Chase.
+
+I felt a worm, and no man. Phyllis, I thought, would probably judge my
+entire character from this exhibition. A man, she would reflect, who
+could be so feeble and miserable a failure at tennis, could not be
+good for much in any department of life. She would compare me
+instructively with my opponent, and contrast his dash and brilliance
+with my own inefficiency. Somehow, the massacre was beginning to have
+a bad effect on my character. My self-respect was ebbing. A little
+more of this, and I should become crushed--a mere human jelly. It was
+my turn to serve. Service is my strong point at tennis. I am
+inaccurate but vigorous, and occasionally send in a quite unplayable
+shot. One or two of these, even at the expense of a fault or so, and I
+might be permitted to retain at least a portion of my self-respect.
+
+I opened with two faults. The sight of Phyllis, sitting calm and cool
+in her chair under the cedar, unnerved me. I served another fault. And
+yet another.
+
+"Here, I say, Garnet," observed Mr. Chase plaintively, "do put me out
+of this hideous suspense. I'm becoming a mere bundle of quivering
+ganglions."
+
+I loath facetiousness in moments of stress. I frowned austerely, made
+no reply, and served another fault, my fifth.
+
+Matters had reached a crisis. Even if I had to lob it under hand, I
+must send the ball over the net with this next stroke.
+
+I restrained myself this time, eschewing the careless vigor which had
+marked my previous efforts. The ball flew in a slow semicircle, and
+pitched inside the correct court. At least, I told myself, I had not
+served a fault.
+
+What happened then I cannot exactly say. I saw my opponent spring
+forward like a panther and whirl his racket. The next moment the back
+net was shaking violently and the ball was rolling swiftly along the
+ground on a return journey to the other court.
+
+"Love--forty," said Mr. Chase. "Phyllis!"
+
+"Yes?"
+
+"That was the Doherty Slosh."
+
+"I thought it must be," said Phyllis.
+
+The game ended with another brace of faults.
+
+In the third game I managed to score fifteen. By the merest chance I
+returned one of his red-hot serves, and--probably through
+surprise--he failed to send it back again.
+
+In the fourth and fifth games I omitted to score.
+
+We began the sixth game. And now for some reason I played really well.
+I struck a little vein of brilliance. I was serving, and this time a
+proportion of my serves went over the net instead of trying to get
+through. The score went from fifteen all to forty-fifteen. Hope began
+to surge through my veins. If I could keep this up, I might win yet.
+
+The Doherty Slosh diminished my lead by fifteen. The Renshaw Slam
+brought the score to Deuce. Then I got in a really fine serve, which
+beat him. 'Vantage in. Another Slosh. Deuce. Another Slam. 'Vantage
+out. It was an awesome moment. There is a tide in the affairs of men
+which taken at the flood--I served. Fault. I served again--a beauty.
+He returned it like a flash into the corner of the court. With a
+supreme effort I got to it. We rallied. I was playing like a
+professor. Then whizz!
+
+The Doherty Slosh had beaten me on the post.
+
+"Game _and_--" said Mr. Chase, twirling his racket into the air and
+catching it by the handle. "Good game that last one."
+
+I turned to see what Phyllis thought of it. At the eleventh hour I had
+shown her of what stuff I was made.
+
+She had disappeared.
+
+"Looking for Miss Derrick?" said Chase, jumping the net, and joining
+me in my court; "she's gone into the house."
+
+"When did she go?"
+
+"At the end of the fifth game," said Chase.
+
+"Gone to dress for dinner, I suppose," he continued. "It must be
+getting late. I think I ought to be going, too, if you don't mind.
+The professor gets a little restive if I keep him waiting for his
+daily bread. Great Scott, that watch can't be right! What do you make
+it? Yes, so do I. I really think I must run. You won't mind? Good
+night, then. See you to-morrow, I hope."
+
+I walked slowly out across the fields. That same star, in which I had
+confided on a former occasion, was at its post. It looked placid and
+cheerful. _It_ never got beaten by six games to love under the eyes of
+its particular lady star. _It_ was never cut out ignominiously by
+infernally capable lieutenants in his Majesty's navy. No wonder it was
+cheerful.
+
+It must be pleasant to be a star.
+
+
+
+
+A COUNCIL OF WAR
+
+XIV
+
+
+"The fact is," said Ukridge, "if things go on as they are now, old
+horse, we shall be in the cart. This business wants bucking up. We
+don't seem to be making headway. What we want is time. If only these
+scoundrels of tradesmen would leave us alone for a spell, we might get
+things going properly. But we're hampered and worried and rattled all
+the time. Aren't we, Millie?"
+
+"Yes, dear."
+
+"You don't let me see the financial side of the thing," I said,
+"except at intervals. I didn't know we were in such a bad way. The
+fowls look fit enough, and Edwin hasn't had one for a week."
+
+"Edwin knows as well as possible when he's done wrong, Mr. Garnet,"
+said Mrs. Ukridge. "He was so sorry after he had killed those other
+two."
+
+"Yes," said Ukridge. "I saw to that."
+
+"As far as I can see," I continued, "we're going strong. Chicken for
+breakfast, lunch, and dinner is a shade monotonous, but look at the
+business we're doing. We sold a whole heap of eggs last week."
+
+"It's not enough, Garny, my boy. We sell a dozen eggs where we ought
+to be selling a hundred, carting them off in trucks for the London
+market. Harrod's and Whiteley's and the rest of them are beginning to
+get on their hind legs, and talk. That's what they're doing. You see,
+Marmaduke, there's no denying it--we _did_ touch them for a lot of
+things on account, and they agreed to take it out in eggs. They seem
+to be getting tired of waiting."
+
+"Their last letter was quite pathetic," said Mrs. Ukridge.
+
+I had a vision of an eggless London. I seemed to see homes rendered
+desolate and lives embittered by the slump, and millionaires bidding
+against one another for the few specimens Ukridge had actually managed
+to dispatch to Brompton and Bayswater.
+
+"I told them in my last letter but three," continued Ukridge
+complainingly, "that I proposed to let them have the eggs on the
+_Times_ installment system, and they said I was frivolous. They said
+that to send thirteen eggs as payment for goods supplied to the value
+of twenty-five pounds one shilling and sixpence was mere trifling.
+Trifling! when those thirteen eggs were absolutely all we had over
+that week after Mrs. Beale had taken what she wanted for the kitchen.
+I tell you what it is, old boy, that woman literally eats eggs."
+
+"The habit is not confined to her," I said.
+
+"What I mean to say is, she seems to bathe in them."
+
+An impressive picture to one who knew Mrs. Beale.
+
+"She says she needs so many for puddings, dear," said Mrs. Ukridge. "I
+spoke to her about it yesterday. And, of course, we often have
+omelets."
+
+"She can't make omelets without breakings eggs," I urged.
+
+"She can't make them without breaking us," said Ukridge. "One or two
+more omelets and we're done for. Another thing," he continued, "that
+incubator thing won't work. _I_ don't know what's wrong with it."
+
+"Perhaps it's your dodge of letting down the temperature."
+
+I had touched upon a tender point.
+
+"My dear fellow," he said earnestly, "there's nothing the matter with
+my figures. It's a mathematical certainty. What's the good of
+mathematics if not to help you work out that sort of thing? No,
+there's something wrong with the machine itself, and I shall probably
+make a complaint to the people I got it from. Where did we get the
+incubator, Millie?"
+
+"Harrod's, I think, dear. Yes, it was Harrod's. It came down with the
+first lot of things from there."
+
+"Then," said Ukridge, banging the table with his fist, while his
+glasses flashed triumph, "we've got 'em! Write and answer that letter
+of theirs to-night, Millie. Sit on them."
+
+"Yes, dear."
+
+"And tell 'em that we'd have sent 'em their confounded eggs weeks ago
+if only their rotten, twopenny-ha'penny incubator had worked with any
+approach to decency."
+
+"Or words to that effect," I suggested.
+
+"Add in a postscript that I consider that the manufacturer of the
+thing ought to rent a padded cell at Earlswood, and that they are
+scoundrels for palming off a groggy machine of that sort on me. I'll
+teach them!"
+
+"Yes, dear."
+
+"The ceremony of opening the morning's letters at Harrod's ought to be
+full of interest and excitement to-morrow," I said.
+
+This dashing counter stroke served to relieve Ukridge's pessimistic
+mood. He seldom looked on the dark side of things for long at a time.
+He began now to speak hopefully of the future. He planned out
+ingenious, if somewhat impracticable, improvements in the farm. Our
+fowls were to multiply so rapidly and consistently that within a short
+space of time Dorsetshire would be paved with them. Our eggs were to
+increase in size till they broke records, and got three-line notices
+in the "Items of Interest" column of the _Daily Mail_. Briefly, each
+hen was to become a happy combination of rabbit and ostrich.
+
+"There is certainly a good time coming," I said. "May it be soon.
+Meanwhile, there remain the local tradesmen. What of them?"
+
+Ukridge relapsed once more into pessimism.
+
+"They are the worst of the lot," he said. "I don't mind about the
+London men so much. They only write. And a letter or two hurts nobody.
+But when it comes to butchers and bakers and grocers and fishmongers
+and fruiterers, and what not, coming up to one's house and dunning one
+in one's own garden--well, it's a little hard, what?"
+
+It may be wondered why, before things came to such a crisis, I had not
+placed my balance at the bank at the disposal of the senior partner
+for use on behalf of the firm. The fact was that my balance was at
+the moment small. I have not yet in the course of this narrative gone
+into my pecuniary position, but I may state here that it was an
+inconvenient one. It was big with possibilities, but of ready cash
+there was but a meager supply. My parents had been poor, but I had a
+wealthy uncle. Uncles are notoriously careless of the comfort of their
+nephews. Mine was no exception. He had views. He was a great believer
+in matrimony, as, having married three wives--not, I should add,
+simultaneously--he had every right to be. He was also of opinion that
+the less money the young bachelor possessed, the better. The
+consequence was that he announced his intention of giving me a
+handsome allowance from the day that I married, but not an instant
+before. Till that glad day I would have to shift for myself. And I am
+bound to admit that--for an uncle--it was a remarkably sensible idea.
+I am also of opinion that it is greatly to my credit, and a proof of
+my pure and unmercenary nature, that I did not instantly put myself up
+to be raffled for, or rush out into the streets and propose marriage
+to the first lady I met. I was making enough with my pen to support
+myself, and, be it ever so humble, there is something pleasant in a
+bachelor existence, or so I had thought until very recently.
+
+I had thus no great stake in Ukridge's chicken farm. I had contributed
+a modest five pounds to the preliminary expenses, and another five
+pounds after the roop incident. But further I could not go with
+safety. When his income is dependent on the whims of editors and
+publishers, the prudent man keeps something up his sleeve against a
+sudden slump in his particular wares. I did not wish to have to make a
+hurried choice between matrimony and the workhouse.
+
+Having exhausted the subject of finance--or, rather, when I began to
+feel that it was exhausting me--I took my clubs and strolled up the
+hill to the links to play off a match with a sportsman from the
+village. I had entered some days previously a competition for a trophy
+(I quote the printed notice) presented by a local supporter of the
+game, in which up to the present I was getting on nicely. I had
+survived two rounds, and expected to beat my present opponent, which
+would bring me into the semi-final. Unless I had bad luck, I felt that
+I ought to get into the final, and win it. As far as I could gather
+from watching the play of my rivals, the professor was the best of
+them, and I was convinced that I should have no difficulty with him.
+But he had the most extraordinary luck at golf, though he never
+admitted it. He also exercised quite an uncanny influence on his
+opponent. I have seen men put completely off their stroke by his good
+fortune.
+
+I disposed of my man without difficulty. We parted a little coldly. He
+decapitated his brassy on the occasion of his striking Dorsetshire
+instead of his ball, and he was slow in recovering from the complex
+emotions which such an episode induces.
+
+In the clubhouse I met the professor, whose demeanor was a welcome
+contrast to that of my late antagonist. The professor had just routed
+his opponent, and so won through to the semi-final. He was warm but
+jubilant.
+
+I congratulated him, and left the place.
+
+Phyllis was waiting outside. She often went round the course with him.
+
+"Good afternoon," I said. "Have you been round with the professor?"
+
+"Yes. We must have been in front of you. Father won his match."
+
+"So he was telling me. I was very glad to hear it."
+
+"Did you win, Mr. Garnet?"
+
+"Yes. Pretty easily. My opponent had bad luck all through. Bunkers
+seemed to have a magnetic attraction for him."
+
+"So you and father are both in the semi-final? I hope you will play
+very badly."
+
+"Thank you, Miss Derrick," I said.
+
+"Yes, it does sound rude, doesn't it? But father has set his heart on
+winning this year. Do you know that he has played in the final round
+two years running now?"
+
+"Really?"
+
+"Both times he was beaten by the same man."
+
+"Who was that? Mr. Derrick plays a much better game than anybody I
+have seen on these links."
+
+"It was nobody who is here now. It was a Colonel Jervis. He has not
+come to Lyme Regis this year. That is why father is hopeful."
+
+"Logically," I said, "he ought to be certain to win."
+
+"Yes; but, you see, you were not playing last year, Mr. Garnet."
+
+"Oh, the professor can make rings round me," I said.
+
+"What did you go round in to-day?"
+
+"We were playing match play, and only did the first dozen holes; but
+my average round is somewhere in the late eighties."
+
+"The best father has ever done is ninety, and that was only once. So
+you see, Mr. Garnet, there's going to be another tragedy this year."
+
+"You make me feel a perfect brute. But it's more than likely, you must
+remember, that I shall fail miserably if I ever do play your father in
+the final. There are days when I play golf very badly."
+
+Phyllis smiled. "Do you really have your off days?"
+
+"Nearly always. There are days when I slice with my driver as if it
+were a bread knife."
+
+"Really?"
+
+"And when I couldn't putt to hit a haystack."
+
+"Then I hope it will be on one of those days that you play father."
+
+"I hope so, too," I said.
+
+"You hope so?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"But don't you want to win?"
+
+"I should prefer to please you."
+
+Mr. Lewis Waller could not have said it better.
+
+"Really, how very unselfish of you, Mr. Garnet," she replied with a
+laugh. "I had no idea that such chivalry existed. I thought a golfer
+would sacrifice anything to win a game."
+
+"Most things."
+
+"And trample on the feelings of anybody."
+
+"Not everybody," I said.
+
+At this point the professor joined us.
+
+
+
+
+XV
+
+THE ARRIVAL OF NEMESIS
+
+
+Some people do not believe in presentiments. They attribute that
+curious feeling that something unpleasant is going to happen to such
+mundane causes as liver or a chill or the weather. For my own part, I
+think there is more in the matter than the casual observer might
+imagine.
+
+I awoke three days after my meeting with the professor at the
+clubhouse filled with a dull foreboding. Somehow I seemed to know that
+that day was going to turn out badly for me. It may have been liver or
+a chill, but it was certainly not the weather. The morning was
+perfect, the most glorious of a glorious summer. There was a haze over
+the valley and out to sea which suggested a warm noon, when the sun
+should have begun the serious duties of the day. The birds were
+singing in the trees and breakfasting on the lawn, while Edwin, seated
+on one of the flower beds, watched them with the eye of a connoisseur.
+Occasionally, when a sparrow hopped in his direction, he would make a
+sudden spring, and the bird would fly away to the other side of the
+lawn. I had never seen Edwin catch a sparrow. I believe they looked on
+him as a bit of a crank, and humored him by coming within springing
+distance, just to keep him amused. Dashing young cock sparrows would
+show off before their particular hen sparrows, and earn a cheap
+reputation for dare-deviltry by going within so many yards of Edwin's
+lair and then darting away.
+
+Bob was in his favorite place on the gravel. I took him with me down
+to the Cob to watch me bathe.
+
+"What's the matter with me to-day, Robert, old man?" I asked him as I
+dried myself.
+
+He blinked lazily, but contributed no suggestion.
+
+"It's no good looking bored," I went on, "because I'm going to talk
+about myself, however much it bores you. Here am I, as fit as a prize
+fighter; living in the open air for I don't know how long; eating
+good, plain food; bathing every morning--sea bathing, mind you; and
+yet what's the result? I feel beastly."
+
+Bob yawned and gave a little whine.
+
+"Yes," I said, "I know I'm in love. But that can't be it, because I
+was in love just as much a week ago, and I felt all right then. But
+isn't she an angel, Bob? Eh? Isn't she? But how about Tom Chase? Don't
+you think he's a dangerous man? He calls her by her Christian name,
+you know, and behaves generally as if she belonged to him. And then
+he sees her every day, while I have to trust to meeting her at odd
+times, and then I generally feel like such a fool I can't think of
+anything to talk about except golf and the weather. He probably sings
+duets with her after dinner. And you know what comes of duets after
+dinner."
+
+Here Bob, who had been trying for some time to find a decent excuse
+for getting away, pretended to see something of importance at the
+other end of the Cob, and trotted off to investigate it, leaving me to
+finish dressing by myself.
+
+"Of course," I said to myself, "it may be merely hunger. I may be all
+right after breakfast, but at present I seem to be working up for a
+really fine fit of the blues."
+
+I whistled for Bob and started for home. On the beach I saw the
+professor some little distance away and waved my towel in a friendly
+manner. He made no reply.
+
+Of course it was possible that he had not seen me, but for some reason
+his attitude struck me as ominous. As far as I could see, he was
+looking straight at me, and he was not a shortsighted man. I could
+think of no reason why he should cut me. We had met on the links on
+the previous morning, and he had been friendliness itself. He had
+called me "me dear boy," supplied me with ginger beer at the
+clubhouse, and generally behaved as if he had been David and I
+Jonathan. Yet in certain moods we are inclined to make mountains out
+of mole-hills, and I went on my way, puzzled and uneasy, with a
+distinct impression that I had received the cut direct.
+
+I felt hurt. What had I done that Providence should make things so
+unpleasant for me? It would be a little hard, as Ukridge would have
+said, if, after all my trouble, the professor had discovered some
+fresh crow to pluck with me. Perhaps Ukridge had been irritating him
+again. I wished he would not identify me so completely with Ukridge. I
+could not be expected to control the man. Then I reflected that they
+could hardly have met in the few hours between my parting from the
+professor at the clubhouse and my meeting with him on the beach.
+Ukridge rarely left the farm. When he was not working among the fowls,
+he was lying on his back in the paddock, resting his massive mind.
+
+I came to the conclusion that, after all, the professor had not seen
+me.
+
+"I'm an idiot, Bob," I said, as we turned in at the farm gate, "and I
+let my imagination run away with me."
+
+Bob wagged his tail in approval of the sentiment.
+
+Breakfast was ready when I got in. There was a cold chicken on the
+sideboard, deviled chicken on the table, and a trio of boiled eggs,
+and a dish of scrambled eggs. I helped myself to the latter and sat
+down.
+
+Ukridge was sorting the letters.
+
+"Morning, Garny," he said. "One for you, Millie."
+
+"It's from Aunt Elizabeth," said Mrs. Ukridge, looking at the
+envelope.
+
+"Wish she'd inclose a check. She could spare it."
+
+"I think she would, dear, if she knew how much it was needed. But I
+don't like to ask her. She's so curious and says such horrid things."
+
+"She does," said Ukridge gloomily. He probably spoke from experience.
+"Two for you, Sebastian. All the rest for me. Eighteen of them, and
+all bills."
+
+He spread them out on the table like a pack of cards, and drew one at
+a venture.
+
+"Whiteley's," he said. "Getting jumpy. Are in receipt of my favor of
+the 7th inst, and are at a loss to understand--all sorts of things.
+Would like something on account."
+
+"Grasping of them," I said.
+
+"They seem to think I'm doing it for fun. How can I let them have
+their money when there isn't any?"
+
+"Sounds difficult."
+
+"Here's one from Dorchester--Smith, the man I got the gramophone from.
+Wants to know when I'm going to settle up for sixteen records."
+
+"Sordid man!"
+
+I wanted to get on with my own correspondence, but Ukridge was one of
+those men who compel one's attention when they are talking.
+
+"The chicken men, the dealer people, you know, want me to pay up for
+the first lot of hens. Considering that they all died of roop, and
+that I was going to send them back, anyhow, after I'd got them to
+hatch out a few chickens, I call that cool. I can't afford to pay
+heavy sums for birds which die off quicker than I can get them in. It
+isn't business."
+
+It was not my business, at any rate, so I switched off my attention
+from Ukridge's troubles and was opening the first of my two letters
+when an exclamation from Mrs. Ukridge made me look up.
+
+She had dropped the letter she had been reading and was staring
+indignantly in front of her. There were two little red spots on her
+cheeks.
+
+"I shall never speak to Aunt Elizabeth again," she said.
+
+"What's the matter, old chap?" inquired Ukridge affectionately,
+glancing up from his pile of bills. "Aunt Elizabeth been getting on
+your nerves again? What's she been saying this time?"
+
+Mrs. Ukridge left the room with a sob.
+
+Ukridge sprang at the letter.
+
+"If that demon doesn't stop writing letters and upsetting Millie I
+shall lynch her," he said. I had never seen him so genuinely angry. He
+turned over the pages till he came to the passage which had caused the
+trouble. "Listen to this, Garnet. 'I'm sorry, but not surprised, to
+hear that the chicken farm is not proving a great success. I think you
+know my opinion of your husband. He is perfectly helpless in any
+matter requiring the exercise of a little common sense and business
+capability.' I like that! 'Pon my soul, I like that! You've known me
+longer than she has, Garny, and you know that it's just in matters
+requiring common sense that I come out strong. What?"
+
+"Of course, old man," I replied dutifully. "The woman must be a fool."
+
+"That's what she calls me two lines farther on. No wonder Millie was
+upset. Why can't these cats leave people alone?"
+
+"O woman, woman!" I threw in helpfully.
+
+"Always interfering--"
+
+"Beastly!"
+
+"--and backbiting--"
+
+"Awful!"
+
+"I shan't stand it!"
+
+"I shouldn't."
+
+"Look here! On the next page she calls me a gaby!"
+
+"It's time you took a strong hand."
+
+"And in the very next sentence refers to me as a perfect guffin.
+What's a guffin, Garny, old boy?"
+
+"It sounds indecent."
+
+"I believe it's actionable."
+
+"I shouldn't wonder."
+
+Ukridge rushed to the door.
+
+"Millie!" he shouted.
+
+No answer.
+
+He slammed the door, and I heard him dashing upstairs.
+
+I turned with a sense of relief to my letters. One was from Lickford.
+It bore a Cornish postmark. I glanced through it, and laid it aside
+for a more exhaustive perusal later on.
+
+The other was in a strange handwriting. I looked at the signature.
+Patrick Derrick. This was queer. What had the professor to say to me?
+
+The next moment my heart seemed to spring to my throat.
+
+"Sir," the letter began.
+
+A pleasant, cheery beginning!
+
+Then it got off the mark, so to speak, like lightning. There was no
+sparring for an opening, no dignified parade of set phrases leading up
+to the main point. It was the letter of a man who was almost too
+furious to write. It gave me the impression that, if he had not
+written it, he would have been obliged to have taken some very violent
+form of exercise by way of relief to his soul.
+
+"You will be good enough," he wrote, "to look on our acquaintance as
+closed. I have no wish to associate with persons of your stamp. If we
+should happen to meet, you will be good enough to treat me as a total
+stranger, as I shall treat you. And, if I may be allowed to give you a
+word of advice, I should recommend you in future, when you wish to
+exercise your humor, to do so in some less practical manner than by
+bribing boatmen to upset your" (_friends_ crossed out thickly, and
+_acquaintances_ substituted). "If you require further enlightenment in
+this matter, the inclosed letter may be of service to you."
+
+With which he remained mine faithfully, Patrick Derrick.
+
+The inclosed letter was from one Jane Muspratt. It was bright and
+interesting.
+
+     DEAR SIR: My Harry, Mr. Hawk, sas to me how it was him
+     upseting the boat and you, not because he is not steddy in a
+     boat which he is no man more so in Lyme Regis but because
+     one of the gentmen what keeps chikkens up the hill, the
+     little one, Mr. Garnick his name is, says to him Hawk, I'll
+     give you a sovrin to upset Mr. Derrick in your boat, and my
+     Harry being esily led was took in and did but he's sory now
+     and wishes he hadn't, and he sas he'll niver do a prackticle
+     joke again for anyone even for a bank note.
+
+Yours obedly
+
+JANE MUSPRATT.
+
+O woman, woman!
+
+At the bottom of everything! History is full of cruel tragedies caused
+by the lethal sex.
+
+Who lost Mark Antony the world? A woman. Who let Samson in so
+atrociously? Woman again. Why did Bill Bailey leave home? Once more,
+because of a woman. And here was I, Jerry Garnet, harmless,
+well-meaning writer of minor novels, going through the same old mill.
+
+I cursed Jane Muspratt. What chance had I with Phyllis now? Could I
+hope to win over the professor again? I cursed Jane Muspratt for the
+second time.
+
+My thoughts wandered to Mr. Harry Hawk. The villain! The scoundrel!
+What business had he to betray me? Well, I could settle with him. The
+man who lays a hand upon a woman, save in the way of kindness, is
+justly disliked by society; so the woman Muspratt, culpable as she
+was, was safe from me. But what of the man Hawk? There no such
+considerations swayed me. I would interview the man Hawk. I would give
+him the most hectic ten minutes of his career. I would say things to
+him the recollection of which would make him start up shrieking in his
+bed in the small hours of the night. I would arise, and be a man and
+slay him--take him grossly, full of bread, with all his crimes,
+broad-blown, as flush as May; at gaming, swearing, or about some act
+that had no relish of salvation in it.
+
+The demon!
+
+My life--ruined. My future--gray and blank. My heart--shattered. And
+why? Because of the scoundrel--Hawk.
+
+Phyllis would meet me in the village, on the Cob, on the links, and
+pass by as if I were the invisible man. And why? Because of the
+reptile--Hawk. The worm--Hawk. The varlet--Hawk.
+
+I crammed my hat on and hurried out of the house toward the village.
+
+
+
+
+A CHANCE MEETING
+
+XVI
+
+
+I roamed the place in search of the varlet for the space of half an
+hour, and, after having drawn all his familiar haunts, found him at
+length leaning over the sea wall near the church, gazing thoughtfully
+into the waters below.
+
+I confronted him.
+
+"Well," I said, "you're a beauty, aren't you?"
+
+He eyed me owlishly. Even at this early hour, I was grieved to see, he
+showed signs of having looked on the bitter while it was brown.
+
+"Beauty?" he echoed.
+
+"What have you got to say for yourself?"
+
+It was plain that he was engaged in pulling his faculties together by
+some laborious process known only to himself. At present my words
+conveyed no meaning to him. He was trying to identify me. He had seen
+me before somewhere, he was certain, but he could not say where, or
+who I was.
+
+"I want to know," I said, "what induced you to be such an abject idiot
+as to let our arrangement get known?"
+
+I spoke quietly. I was not going to waste the choicer flowers of
+speech on a man who was incapable of understanding them. Later on,
+when he had awakened to a sense of his position, I would begin really
+to talk to him.
+
+He continued to stare at me. Then a sudden flash of intelligence lit
+up his features.
+
+"Mr. Garnick," he said.
+
+"You've got it at last."
+
+He stretched out a huge hand.
+
+"I want to know," I said distinctly, "what you've got to say for
+yourself after letting our affair with the professor become public
+property?"
+
+He paused a while in thought.
+
+"Dear sir," he said at last, as if he were dictating a letter, "dear
+sir, I owe you--ex--exp--"
+
+"You do," said I grimly. "I should like to hear it."
+
+"Dear sir, listen me."
+
+"Go on, then."
+
+"You came me. You said, 'Hawk, Hawk, ol' fren', listen me. You tip
+this ol' bufflehead into sea,' you said, 'an' gormed if I don't give
+'ee a gould savrin.' That's what you said me. Isn't that what you said
+me?"
+
+I did not deny it.
+
+"Ve' well. I said you, 'Right,' I said. I tipped the ol' soul into
+sea, and I got the gould savrin."
+
+"Yes, you took care of that. All this is quite true, but it's beside
+the point. We are not disputing about what happened. What I want to
+know for the third time--is what made you let the cat out of the bag?
+Why couldn't you keep quiet about it?"
+
+He waved his hand.
+
+"Dear sir," he replied. "This way. Listen me."
+
+It was a tragic story that he unfolded. My wrath ebbed as I listened.
+After all, the fellow was not so greatly to blame. I felt that in his
+place I should have acted as he had done. Fate was culpable, and fate
+alone.
+
+It appeared that he had not come well out of the matter of the
+accident. I had not looked at it hitherto from his point of view.
+While the rescue had left me the popular hero, it had had quite the
+opposite result for him. He had upset his boat and would have drowned
+his passenger, said public opinion, if the young hero from
+London--myself--had not plunged in, and at the risk of his life
+brought the professor to shore. Consequently, he was despised by all
+as an inefficient boatman. He became a laughing stock. The local wags
+made laborious jests when he passed. They offered him fabulous sums to
+take their worst enemies out for a row with him. They wanted to know
+when he was going to school to learn his business. In fact, they
+behaved as wags do and always have done at all times all the world
+over.
+
+Now, all this Mr. Hawk, it seemed, would have borne cheerfully and
+patiently for my sake, or, at any rate, for the sake of the good
+golden sovereign I had given him. But a fresh factor appeared in the
+problem, complicating it grievously. To wit, Miss Jane Muspratt.
+
+"She said me," explained Mr. Hawk with pathos, "'Harry 'Awk,' she
+said, 'yeou'm a girt fule, an' I don't marry noone as is ain't to be
+trusted in a boat by hisself, and what has jokes made about him by
+that Tom Leigh.' I punched Tom Leigh," observed Mr. Hawk
+parenthetically. "'So,' she said me, 'yeou can go away, an' I don't
+want to see yeou again.'"
+
+This heartless conduct on the part of Miss Muspratt had had the
+natural result of making him confess all in self-defense, and she had
+written to the professor the same night.
+
+I forgave Mr. Hawk. I think he was hardly sober enough to understand,
+for he betrayed no emotion.
+
+"It is fate, Hawk," I said, "simply fate. There is a divinity that
+shapes our ends, rough-hew them how we will, and it's no good
+grumbling."
+
+"Yiss," said Mr. Hawk, after chewing this sentiment for a while in
+silence, "so she said me, 'Hawk,' she said--like that--'you're a girt
+fule--'"
+
+"That's all right," I replied. "I quite understand. As I say, it's
+simply fate. Good-by."
+
+And I left him.
+
+As I was going back, I met the professor and Phyllis.
+
+They passed me without a look.
+
+I wandered on in quite a fervor of self-pity. I was in one of those
+moods when life suddenly seems to become irksome, when the future
+stretches blank and gray in front of one. In such a mood it is
+imperative that one should seek distraction. The shining example of
+Mr. Harry Hawk did not lure me. Taking to drink would be a nuisance.
+Work was what I wanted. I would toil like a navvy all day among the
+fowls, separating them when they fought, gathering in the eggs when
+they laid, chasing them across country when they got away, and even,
+if necessity arose, painting their throats with turpentine when they
+were stricken with roop. Then, after dinner, when the lamps were lit,
+and Mrs. Ukridge petted Edwin and sewed, and Ukridge smoked cigars and
+incited the gramophone to murder "Mumbling Mose," I would steal away
+to my bedroom and write--and write--and _write_--and go on writing
+till my fingers were numb and my eyes refused to do their duty. And,
+when time had passed, I might come to feel that it was all for the
+best. A man must go through the fire before he can write his
+masterpiece. We learn in suffering what we teach in song. What we lose
+on the swings we make up on the roundabouts. Jerry Garnet, the man,
+might become a depressed, hopeless wreck, with the iron planted
+irremovably in his soul; but Jeremy Garnet, the author, should turn
+out such a novel of gloom that strong critics would weep and the
+public jostle for copies till Mudie's doorways became a shambles.
+
+Thus might I some day feel that all this anguish was really a
+blessing--effectively disguised.
+
+But I doubted it.
+
+We were none of us very cheerful now at the farm. Even Ukridge's
+spirit was a little daunted by the bills which poured in by every
+post. It was as if the tradesmen of the neighborhood had formed a
+league and were working in concert. Or it may have been due to thought
+waves. Little accounts came not in single spies but in battalions. The
+popular demand for a sight of the color of his money grew daily. Every
+morning at breakfast he would give us fresh bulletins of the state of
+mind of each of our creditors, and thrill us with the announcement
+that Whiteley's were getting cross and Harrod's jumpy, or that the
+bearings of Dawlish, the grocer, were becoming over-heated. We lived
+in a continual atmosphere of worry. Chicken and nothing but chicken
+at meals, and chicken and nothing but chicken between meals, had
+frayed our nerves. An air of defeat hung over the place. We were a
+beaten side, and we realized it. We had been playing an uphill game
+for nearly two months, and the strain was beginning to tell. Ukridge
+became uncannily silent. Mrs. Ukridge, though she did not understand,
+I fancy, the details of the matter, was worried because Ukridge was.
+Mrs. Beale had long since been turned into a soured cynic by the lack
+of chances vouchsafed her for the exercise of her art. And as for me,
+I have never since spent so profoundly miserable a week. I was not
+even permitted the anodyne of work. There seemed to be nothing to do
+on the farm. The chickens were quite happy, and only asked to be let
+alone and allowed to have their meals at regular intervals. And every
+day one or more of their number would vanish into the kitchen, and
+Mrs. Beale would serve up the corpse in some cunning disguise, and we
+would try to delude ourselves into the idea that it was something
+altogether different.
+
+There was one solitary gleam of variety in our menu. An editor sent me
+a check for a guinea for a set of verses. We cashed that check and
+trooped round the town in a body, laying out the money. We bought a
+leg of mutton and a tongue and sardines and pineapple chunks and
+potted meat and many other noble things, and had a perfect banquet.
+
+After that we relapsed into routine again.
+
+Deprived of physical labor, with the exception of golf and
+bathing--trivial sports compared with work in the fowl runs at its
+hardest--I tried to make up for it by working at my novel.
+
+It refused to materialize.
+
+I felt, like the man in the fable, as if some one had played a mean
+trick on me, and substituted for my brain a side order of
+cauliflower. By no manner of means could I get the plot to shape
+itself. I could not detach my mind from my own painful case. Instead
+of thinking of my characters, I sat in my chair and thought miserably
+of Phyllis.
+
+The only progress I achieved was with my villain.
+
+I drew him from the professor and made him a blackmailer. He had
+several other social defects, but that was his profession. That was
+the thing he did really well.
+
+It was on one of the many occasions on which I had sat in my room, pen
+in hand, through the whole of a lovely afternoon, with no better
+result than a slight headache, that I bethought me of that little
+paradise on the Ware Cliff, hung over the sea and backed by green
+woods. I had not been there for sometime, owing principally to an
+entirely erroneous idea that I could do more solid work sitting in a
+straight, hard chair at a table than lying on soft turf with the sea
+wind in my eyes.
+
+But now the desire to visit that little clearing again drove me from
+my room. In the drawing-room below, the gramophone was dealing
+brassily with "Mister Blackman." Outside, the sun was just thinking of
+setting. The Ware Cliff was the best medicine for me. What does
+Kipling say?
+
+    And soon you will find that the sun and the wind
+      And the Djinn of the Garden, too,
+    Have lightened the Hump, Cameelious Hump,
+      The Hump that is black and blue.
+
+His instructions include digging with a hoe and a shovel also, but I
+could omit that. The sun and wind were what I needed.
+
+I took the upper road. In certain moods I preferred it to the path
+along the cliff. I walked fast. The exercise was soothing.
+
+To reach my favorite clearing I had to take to the fields on the left
+and strike down hill in the direction of the sea. I hurried down the
+narrow path.
+
+I broke into the clearing at a jog trot, and stood panting. And at the
+same moment, looking cool and beautiful in her white dress, Phyllis
+entered it from the other side. Phyllis--without the professor.
+
+
+
+
+OF A SENTIMENTAL NATURE
+
+XVII
+
+
+She was wearing a Panama, and she carried a sketching block and camp
+stool.
+
+"Good evening," I said.
+
+"Good evening," said she.
+
+It is curious how different the same words can sound when spoken by
+different people. My "good evening" might have been that of a man with
+a particularly guilty conscience caught in the act of doing something
+more than usually ignoble. She spoke like a somewhat offended angel.
+
+"It's a lovely evening," I went on pluckily.
+
+"Very."
+
+"The sunset!"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"Er--"
+
+She raised a pair of blue eyes, devoid of all expression save a faint
+suggestion of surprise, gazed through me for a moment at some object a
+couple of thousand miles away, and lowered them again, leaving me with
+a vague feeling that there was something wrong with my personal
+appearance.
+
+Very calmly she moved to the edge of the cliff, arranged her camp
+stool, and sat down. Neither of us spoke a word. I watched her while
+she filled a little mug with water from a little bottle, opened her
+paint box, selected a brush, and placed her sketching block in
+position.
+
+She began to paint.
+
+Now, by all the laws of good taste, I should before this have made a
+dignified exit. When a lady shows a gentleman that his presence is
+unwelcome, it is up to him, as an American friend of mine pithily
+observed to me on one occasion, to get busy and chase himself, and
+see if he can make the tall timber in two jumps. In other words, to
+retire. It was plain that I was not regarded as an essential ornament
+of this portion of the Ware Cliff. By now, if I had been the perfect
+gentleman, I ought to have been a quarter of a mile away.
+
+But there is a definite limit to what a man can do. I remained.
+
+The sinking sun flung a carpet of gold across the sea. Phyllis's hair
+was tinged with it. Little waves tumbled lazily on the beach below.
+Except for the song of a distant blackbird running through its
+repertory before retiring for the night, everything was silent.
+
+Especially Phyllis.
+
+She sat there, dipping and painting and dipping again, with never a
+word for me--standing patiently and humbly behind her.
+
+"Miss Derrick," I said.
+
+She half turned her head.
+
+"Yes?"
+
+One of the most valuable things which a lifetime devoted to sport
+teaches a man is "never play the goose game." Bold attack is the
+safest rule in nine cases out of ten, wherever you are and whatever
+you may be doing. If you are batting, attack the ball. If you are
+boxing, get after your man. If you are talking, go to the point.
+
+"Why won't you speak to me?" I said.
+
+"I don't understand you."
+
+"Why won't you speak to me?"
+
+"I think you know, Mr. Garnet."
+
+"It is because of that boat accident?"
+
+"Accident!"
+
+"Episode," I amended.
+
+She went on painting in silence. From where I stood I could see her
+profile. Her chin was tilted. Her expression was determined.
+
+"Is it?" I said.
+
+"Need we discuss it?"
+
+"Not if you do not wish."
+
+I paused.
+
+"But," I added, "I should have liked a chance to defend myself....
+What glorious sunsets there have been these last few days. I believe
+we shall have this sort of weather for another month."
+
+"I should not have thought that possible."
+
+"The glass is going up," I said.
+
+"I was not talking about the weather."
+
+"It was dull of me to introduce such a worn-out topic."
+
+"You said you could defend yourself."
+
+"I said I should like the chance to do so."
+
+"Then you shall have it."
+
+"That is very kind of you. Thank you."
+
+"Is there any reason for gratitude?"
+
+"Every reason."
+
+"Go on, Mr. Garnet. I can listen while I paint. But please sit down.
+I don't like being talked to from a height."
+
+I sat down on the grass in front of her, feeling as I did so that the
+change of position in a manner clipped my wings. It is difficult to
+speak movingly while sitting on the ground. Instinctively, I avoided
+eloquence. Standing up, I might have been pathetic and pleading.
+Sitting down, I was compelled to be matter of fact.
+
+"You remember, of course, the night you and Professor Derrick dined
+with us? When I say dined, I use the word in a loose sense."
+
+For a moment I thought she was going to smile. We were both thinking
+of Edwin. But it was only for a moment, and then her face grew cold
+once more, and the chin resumed its angle of determination.
+
+"Yes," she said.
+
+"You remember the unfortunate ending of the festivities?"
+
+"Well?"
+
+"I naturally wished to mend matters. It occurred to me that an
+excellent way would be by doing your father a service. It was seeing
+him fishing that put the idea of a boat accident into my head. I hoped
+for a genuine boat accident. But those things only happen when one
+does not want them. So I determined to engineer one."
+
+"You didn't think of the shock to my father."
+
+"I did. It worried me very much."
+
+"But you upset him all the same."
+
+"Reluctantly."
+
+She looked up and our eyes met. I could detect no trace of forgiveness
+in hers.
+
+"You behaved abominably," she said.
+
+"I played a risky game, and I lost. And I shall now take the
+consequences. With luck I should have won. I did not have luck, and I
+am not going to grumble about it. But I am grateful to you for letting
+me explain. I should not have liked you to go on thinking that I
+played practical jokes on my friends. That is all I have to say, I
+think. It was kind of you to listen. Good-by, Miss Derrick."
+
+I got up.
+
+"Are you going?"
+
+"Why not?"
+
+"Please sit down again."
+
+"But you wish to be alone--"
+
+"Please sit down!"
+
+There was a flush on the fair cheek turned toward me, and the chin was
+tilted higher.
+
+I sat down.
+
+To westward the sky had changed to the hue of a bruised cherry. The
+sun had sunk below the horizon, and the sea looked cold and leaden.
+The blackbird had long since gone to bed.
+
+"I am glad you told me, Mr. Garnet."
+
+She dipped her brush in the water.
+
+"Because I don't like to think badly of--people."
+
+She bent her head over her painting.
+
+"Though I still think you behaved very wrongly. And I am afraid my
+father will never forgive you for what you did."
+
+Her father! As if he counted!
+
+"But you do?" I said eagerly.
+
+"I think you are less to blame than I thought you were at first."
+
+"No more than that?"
+
+"You can't expect to escape all consequences. You did a very stupid
+thing."
+
+"Consider the temptation."
+
+The sky was a dull gray now. It was growing dusk. The grass on which I
+sat was wet with dew.
+
+I stood up.
+
+"Isn't it getting a little dark for painting?" I said. "Are you sure
+you won't catch cold? It's very damp."
+
+"Perhaps it is. And it is late, too."
+
+She shut her paint box and emptied the little mug on the grass.
+
+"You will let me carry your things?" I said.
+
+I think she hesitated, but only for a moment. I possessed myself of
+the camp stool, and we started on our homeward journey. We were both
+silent. The spell of the quiet summer evening was on us.
+
+"'And all the air a solemn stillness holds,'" she said softly. "I love
+this cliff, Mr. Garnet. It's the most soothing place in the world."
+
+"I have found it so this evening."
+
+She glanced at me quickly.
+
+"You're not looking well," she said. "Are you sure you are not
+overworking yourself?"
+
+"No, it's not that."
+
+Somehow we had stopped, as if by agreement, and were facing each
+other. There was a look in her eyes I had never seen there before.
+The twilight hung like a curtain between us and the world. We were
+alone together in a world of our own.
+
+"It is because I had displeased you," I said.
+
+She laughed nervously.
+
+"I have loved you ever since I first saw you," I said doggedly.
+
+
+
+
+UKRIDGE GIVES ME ADVICE
+
+XVIII
+
+
+Hours after--or so it seemed to me--we reached the spot at which our
+ways divided. We stopped, and I felt as if I had been suddenly cast
+back into the workaday world from some distant and pleasanter planet.
+I think Phyllis must have had something of the same sensation, for we
+both became on the instant intensely practical and businesslike.
+
+"But about your father," I said briskly. I was not even holding her
+hand.
+
+"That's the difficulty."
+
+"He won't give his consent?"
+
+"I'm afraid he wouldn't dream of it."
+
+"You can't persuade him?"
+
+"I can in most things, but not in this. You see, even if nothing had
+happened, he wouldn't like to lose me just yet, because of Norah."
+
+"Norah!"
+
+"My sister. She's going to be married in October. I wonder if we shall
+ever be as happy as they will?"
+
+I laughed scornfully.
+
+"Happy! They will be miserable compared with us. Not that I know who
+the man is."
+
+"Why, Tom, of course. Do you mean to say you really didn't know?"
+
+"Tom! Tom Chase?"
+
+"Of course."
+
+I gasped.
+
+"Well, I'm--hanged," I said. "When I think of the torments I've been
+through because of that wretched man, and all for nothing, I don't
+know what to say."
+
+"Don't you like Tom?"
+
+"Very much. I always did. But I was awfully jealous of him."
+
+"You weren't! How silly of you."
+
+"Of course I was. He was always about with you, and called you
+Phyllis, and generally behaved as if you and he were the heroine and
+hero of a musical comedy, so what else could I think? I heard you
+singing duets after dinner once. I drew the worst conclusions."
+
+"When was that?"
+
+"It was shortly after Ukridge had got on your father's nerves, and
+nipped our acquaintance in the bud. I used to come every night to the
+hedge opposite your drawing-room window, and brood there by the hour."
+
+"Poor old boy!"
+
+"Hoping to hear you sing. And when you did sing, and he joined in all
+flat, I used to scold. You'll probably find most of the bark worn off
+the tree I leaned against."
+
+"Poor old man! Still, it's all over now, isn't it?"
+
+"And when I was doing my very best to show off before you at tennis,
+you went away just as I got into form."
+
+"I'm very sorry, but I couldn't know--could I? I thought you always
+played like that."
+
+"I know. I knew you would. It nearly turned my hair white. I didn't
+see how a girl could ever care for a man who was so bad at tennis."
+
+"One doesn't love a man because he's good at tennis."
+
+"What _does_ a girl see to love in a man?" I inquired abruptly; and
+paused on the verge of a great discovery.
+
+"Oh, I don't know," she replied, most unsatisfactorily.
+
+And I could draw no views from her.
+
+"But about father," said she. "What _are_ we to do?"
+
+"He objects to me."
+
+"He's perfectly furious with you."
+
+"Blow, blow," I said, "thou winter wind. Thou art not so unkind--"
+
+"He'll never forgive you."
+
+"As man's ingratitude. I saved his life--at the risk of my own. Why, I
+believe I've got a legal claim on him. Whoever heard of a man having
+his life saved, and not being delighted when his preserver wanted to
+marry his daughter? Your father is striking at the very root of the
+short-story writer's little earnings. He mustn't be allowed to do it."
+
+"Jerry!"
+
+I started.
+
+"Again!" I said.
+
+"What?"
+
+"Say it again. Do, please. Now."
+
+"Very well. Jerry!"
+
+"It was the first time you had called me by my Christian name. I don't
+suppose you've the remotest notion how splendid it sounds when you
+say it. There is something poetical, something almost holy, about it."
+
+"Jerry, please!"
+
+"Say on."
+
+"Do be sensible. Don't you see how serious this is? We must think how
+we can make father consent."
+
+"All right," I said. "We'll tackle the point. I'm sorry to be
+frivolous, but I'm so happy I can't keep it all in. I've got you, and
+I can't think of anything else."
+
+"Try."
+
+"I'll pull myself together.... Now, say on once more."
+
+"We can't marry without father's consent."
+
+"Why not?" I said, not having a marked respect for the professor's
+whims. "Gretna Green is out of date, but there are registrars."
+
+"I hate the very idea of a registrar," she said with decision.
+"Besides--"
+
+"Well?"
+
+"Poor father would never get over it. We've always been such friends.
+If I married against his wishes, he would--oh, you know--not let me
+come near him again, and not write to me. And he would hate it all the
+time he was doing it. He would be bored to death without me."
+
+"Anybody would," I said.
+
+"Because, you see, Norah has never been quite the same. She has spent
+such a lot of her time on visits to people that she and father don't
+understand each other so well as he and I do. She would try and be
+nice to him, but she wouldn't know him as I do. And, besides, she will
+be with him such a little, now she's going to be married."
+
+"But, look here," I said, "this is absurd. You say your father would
+never see you again, and so on, if you married me. Why? It's
+nonsense. It isn't as if I were a sort of social outcast. We were the
+best of friends till that man Hawk gave me away like that."
+
+"I know. But he's very obstinate about some things. You see, he thinks
+the whole thing has made him look ridiculous, and it will take him a
+long time to forgive you for that."
+
+I realized the truth of this. One can pardon any injury to oneself,
+unless it hurts one's vanity. Moreover, even in a genuine case of
+rescue, the rescued man must always feel a little aggrieved with his
+rescuer when he thinks the matter over in cold blood. He must regard
+him unconsciously as the super regards the actor manager, indebted to
+him for the means of supporting existence, but grudging him the lime
+light and the center of the stage and the applause. Besides, everyone
+instinctively dislikes being under an obligation which he can never
+wholly repay. And when a man discovers that he has experienced all
+these mixed sensations for nothing, as the professor had done, his
+wrath is likely to be no slight thing.
+
+Taking everything into consideration, I could not but feel that it
+would require more than a little persuasion to make the professor
+bestow his blessing with that genial warmth which we like to see in
+our fathers-in-law elect.
+
+"You don't think," I said, "that time, the great healer, and so on--he
+won't feel kindlier disposed toward me--say in a month's time?"
+
+"Of course, he _might_," said Phyllis; but she spoke doubtfully.
+
+"He strikes me, from what I have seen of him, as a man of moods. I
+might do something one of these days which would completely alter his
+views. We will hope for the best."
+
+"About telling father--"
+
+"Need we tell him?" I asked.
+
+"Yes, we must. I couldn't bear to think that I was keeping it from
+him. I don't think I've ever kept anything from him in my life.
+Nothing bad, I mean."
+
+"You count this among your darker crimes, then?"
+
+"I was looking at it from father's point of view. He will be awfully
+angry. I don't know how I shall begin telling him."
+
+"Good heavens!" I cried, "you surely don't think I'm going to let you
+do that! Keep safely out of the way while you tell him? Not much. I'm
+coming back with you now, and we'll break the bad news together."
+
+"No, not to-night. He may be tired and rather cross. We had better
+wait till to-morrow. You might speak to him in the morning."
+
+"Where shall I find him?"
+
+"He is certain to go to the beach before breakfast to bathe."
+
+"Good. To-morrow, do thy worst, for I have lived to-day. I'll be
+there."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+"Ukridge," I said, when I got back, "can you give me audience for a
+brief space? I want your advice."
+
+This stirred him like a trumpet blast. When a man is in the habit of
+giving unsolicited counsel to everyone he meets, it is as invigorating
+as an electric shock to him to be asked for it spontaneously.
+
+"What's up, old horse?" he asked eagerly. "I'll tell you what to do.
+Get on to it. Bang it out. Here, let's go into the garden."
+
+I approved of this. I can always talk more readily in the dark, and I
+did not wish to be interrupted by the sudden entrance of the hired
+retainer or Mrs. Beale. We walked down to the paddock. Ukridge lit a
+cigar.
+
+"I'm in love, Ukridge," I said.
+
+"What!"
+
+"More--I'm engaged."
+
+A huge hand whistled through the darkness and smote me heavily between
+the shoulder blades.
+
+"Thanks," I said; "that felt congratulatory."
+
+"By Jove! old boy, I wish you luck. 'Pon my word, I do. Fancy you
+engaged! Best thing in the world for you. Never knew what happiness
+was till I married. A man wants a helpmeet--"
+
+"And this man," I said, "seems likely to go on wanting. That's where I
+need your advice. I'm engaged to Miss Derrick."
+
+"Miss Derrick!" He spoke as if he hardly knew whom I meant.
+
+"You can't have forgotten her! Good heavens, what eyes some men have!
+Why, if I'd only seen her once, I should have remembered her all my
+life."
+
+"I know now. She came to dinner here with her father, that fat little
+buffer."
+
+"As you were careful to call him at the time. Thereby starting all the
+trouble."
+
+"You fished him out of the water afterwards."
+
+"Quite right."
+
+"Why, it's a perfect romance, old horse. It's like the stories you
+read."
+
+"And write. But they all end happily. 'There is none, my brave young
+preserver, to whom I would more willingly intrust my daughter's
+happiness.' Unfortunately, in my little drama, the heavy father seems
+likely to forget his cue."
+
+"The old man won't give his consent?"
+
+"Probably not."
+
+"But why? What's the matter with you? If you marry, you'll come into
+your uncle's money, and all that."
+
+"True. Affluence stares me in the face."
+
+"And you fished him out of the water."
+
+"After previously chucking him in."
+
+"What!"
+
+"At any rate, by proxy."
+
+I explained. Ukridge, I regret to say, laughed.
+
+"You vagabond!" he said. "'Pon my word, old horse, to look at you, one
+would never have thought you'd have had it in you."
+
+"I can't help looking respectable."
+
+"What are you going to do about it? The old man's got it up against
+you good and strong, there's no doubt of that."
+
+"That's where I wanted your advice. You're a man of resource. What
+would you do if you were in my place?"
+
+Ukridge tapped me impressively on the shoulder.
+
+"Marmaduke," he said, "there's one thing that'll carry you through any
+mess."
+
+"And that is--"
+
+"Cheek, my boy--cheek! Gall! Why, take my case. I never told you how I
+came to marry, did I? I thought not. Well, it was this way. You've
+heard us mention Millie's Aunt Elizabeth--what? Well, then, when I
+tell you that she was Millie's nearest relative, and it was her
+consent I had to gather, you'll see that it wasn't a walk-over."
+
+"Well?" I said.
+
+"First time I saw Millie was in a first-class carriage on the
+underground. I'd got a third-class ticket, by the way. We weren't
+alone. It was five a side. But she sat opposite me, and I fell in love
+with her there and then. We both got out at South Kensington. I
+followed her. She went to a house in Thurloe Square. I waited outside
+and thought it over. I had got to get into that house and make her
+acquaintance. So I rang the bell. 'Is Lady Lichenhall at home?' I
+asked. You note the artfulness? My asking for Lady Lichenhall made 'em
+think I was one of the upper ten--what?"
+
+"How were you dressed?" I could not help asking.
+
+"Oh, it was one of my frock-coat days. I'd been to see a man about
+tutoring his son. There was nothing the matter with my appearance.
+'No,' said the servant, 'nobody of that name lives here. This is Lady
+Lakenheath's house.' So, you see, I had luck at the start, because the
+two names were a bit alike. Well, I got the servant to show me in
+somehow, and, once in, you can wager I talked for all I was worth.
+Kept up a flow of conversation about being misdirected and coming to
+the wrong house, and so on. Went away, and called a few days later.
+Called regularly. Met 'em at every theater they went to, and bowed,
+and finally got away with Millie before her aunt could tell what was
+happening, or who I was or what I was doing or anything."
+
+"And what's the moral?" I said.
+
+"Why, go in hard. Rush 'em. Bustle 'em. Don't give 'em a moment's
+rest."
+
+"Don't play the goose game," I said with that curious thrill we feel
+when somebody's independent view of a matter coincides with one's own.
+
+"That's it. Don't play the goose game. Don't give 'em time to think.
+Why, if I'd given Millie's aunt time to think, where should we have
+been? Not at Lyme Regis together, I'll bet."
+
+"Ukridge," I said, "you inspire me. You would inspire a caterpillar. I
+will go to the professor--I was going anyhow--but now I shall go
+aggressively, and bustle him. I will surprise a father's blessing out
+of him, if I have to do it with a crowbar!"
+
+
+
+
+I ASK PAPA
+
+XIX
+
+
+Reviewing the matter later, I see that I made a poor choice of time
+and place. But at the moment this did not strike me. It is a simple
+thing, I reflected, for a man to pass another by haughtily and without
+recognition, when they meet on dry land; but when the said man, being
+an indifferent swimmer, is accosted in the water and out of his depth,
+the feat becomes a hard one.
+
+When, therefore, having undressed on the Cob on the following morning,
+I spied in the distance, as I was about to dive, the gray head of the
+professor bobbing on the face of the waters, I did not hesitate. I
+plunged in and swam rapidly toward him.
+
+His face was turned in the opposite direction when I came up with him,
+and it was soon evident that he had not observed my approach. For
+when, treading water easily in his immediate rear, I wished him good
+morning in my most conciliatory tones, he stood not upon the order of
+his sinking, but went under like so much pig iron. I waited
+courteously until he rose to the surface once more, when I repeated my
+remark.
+
+He expelled the last remnant of water from his mouth with a wrathful
+splutter, and cleared his eyes with the back of his hand.
+
+"The water is delightfully warm," I said.
+
+"Oh, it's you!" said he, and I could not cheat myself into believing
+that he spoke cordially.
+
+"You are swimming splendidly this morning," I said, feeling that an
+ounce of flattery is often worth a pound of rhetoric. "If," I added,
+"you will allow me to say so."
+
+"I will not," he snapped. "I--" Here a small wave, noticing that his
+mouth was open, walked in. "I wish," he resumed warmly, "as I said in
+me letter, to have nothing to do with you. I consider ye've behaved in
+a manner that can only be described as abominable, and I will thank ye
+to leave me alone."
+
+"But, allow me--"
+
+"I will not allow ye, sir. I will allow ye nothing. Is it not enough
+to make me the laughingstock, the butt, sir, of this town, without
+pursuing me in this manner when I wish to enjoy a quiet swim?"
+
+His remarks, which I have placed on paper as if they were continuous
+and uninterrupted, were punctuated in reality by a series of gasps and
+puffings as he received and ejected the successors of the wave he had
+swallowed at the beginning of our little chat. The art of conducting
+bright conversation while in the water is not given to every swimmer.
+This he seemed to realize, for, as if to close the interview, he
+proceeded to make his way as quickly as he could toward the shore.
+Using my best stroke, I shot beyond him and turned, treading water as
+before.
+
+"But, professor," I said, "one moment."
+
+I was growing annoyed with the man. I could have ducked him but for
+the reflection that my prospects of obtaining his consent to my
+engagement with Phyllis would hardly have been enhanced thereby. No
+more convincing proof of my devotion can be given than this, that I
+did not seize that little man by the top of his head, thrust him under
+water, and keep him there.
+
+I restrained myself. I was suave. Soothing, even.
+
+"But, professor," I said, "one moment."
+
+"Not one," he spluttered. "Go away, sir. I will have nothing to say to
+you."
+
+"I shan't keep you a minute."
+
+He had been trying all this while to pass me and escape to the shore,
+but I kept always directly in front of him. He now gave up the attempt
+and came to standstill.
+
+"Well?" he said.
+
+Without preamble I gave out the text of the address I was about to
+deliver to him.
+
+"I love your daughter Phyllis, Mr. Derrick. She loves me. In fact, we
+are engaged," I said.
+
+He went under as if he had been seized with cramp. It was a little
+trying having to argue with a man, of whom one could not predict with
+certainty that at any given moment he would not be under water. It
+tended to spoil one's flow of eloquence. The best of arguments is
+useless if the listener suddenly disappears in the middle of it.
+
+However, I persevered.
+
+"Mr. Derrick," I said, as his head emerged, "you are naturally
+surprised."
+
+"You--you--you--"
+
+So far from cooling him, liberal doses of water seemed to make him
+more heated.
+
+"You impudent scoundrel!"
+
+He said that--not I. What I said was more gentlemanly, more courteous,
+on a higher plane altogether.
+
+I said winningly: "Mr. Derrick, cannot we let bygones be bygones?"
+
+From his expression I gathered that we could not.
+
+I continued. I was under the unfortunate necessity of having to
+condense my remarks. I was not able to let myself go as I could have
+wished, for time was an important consideration. Erelong, swallowing
+water at his present rate, the professor must inevitably become
+waterlogged. It behooved me to be succinct.
+
+"I have loved your daughter," I said rapidly, "ever since I first saw
+her. I learned last night that she loved me. But she will not marry me
+without your consent. Stretch your arms out straight from the
+shoulders and fill your lungs well, and you can't sink. So I have come
+this morning to ask for your consent. I know we have not been on the
+best of terms lately."
+
+"You--"
+
+"For Heaven's sake, don't try to talk. Your one chance of remaining on
+the surface is to keep your lungs well filled. The fault," I said
+generously, "was mine. But when you have heard my explanation, I am
+sure you will forgive me. There, I told you so."
+
+He reappeared some few feet to the left. I swam up and resumed:
+
+"When you left us so abruptly after our little dinner party, you put
+me in a very awkward position. I was desperately in love with your
+daughter, and as long as you were in the frame of mind in which you
+left, I could not hope to find an opportunity of telling her so. You
+see what a fix I was in, don't you? I thought for hours and hours, to
+try and find some means of bringing about a reconciliation. You
+wouldn't believe how hard I thought. At last, seeing you fishing one
+morning when I was on the Cob, it struck me all of a sudden that the
+very best way would be to arrange a little boating accident. I was
+confident that I could rescue you all right."
+
+"You young blackguard!"
+
+He managed to slip past me, and made for the shore again.
+
+"Strike out--but hear me," I said, swimming by his side. "Look at the
+thing from the standpoint of a philosopher. The fact that the rescue
+was arranged oughtn't really to influence you in the least. You didn't
+know it at the time, therefore relatively it was not, and you were
+genuinely saved from a watery grave."
+
+I felt that I was becoming a shade too metaphysical, but I could not
+help it. What I wanted to point out was that I had certainly pulled
+him out of the water, and that the fact that I had caused him to be
+pushed in had nothing to do with the case. Either a man is a gallant
+rescuer or he is not a gallant rescuer. There is no middle course. I
+had saved his life, for he would have drowned if he had been left to
+himself, and was consequently entitled to his gratitude. And that was
+all that there was to be said about it.
+
+These things I endeavored to make plain to him as we swam along. But
+whether it was that the salt water he had swallowed dulled his
+intelligence or that my power of stating a case neatly was to seek,
+the fact remains that he reached the beach an unconvinced man.
+
+We faced one another, dripping.
+
+"Then may I consider," I said, "that your objections are removed? We
+have your consent?"
+
+He stamped angrily, and his bare foot came down on a small but
+singularly sharp pebble. With a brief exclamation he seized the foot
+with one hand and hopped. While hopping, he delivered his ultimatum.
+Probably this is the only instance on record of a father adopting this
+attitude in dismissing a suitor.
+
+"You may not," he said. "You may not consider any such thing. My
+objections were never more--absolute. You detain me in the water till
+I am blue, sir, blue with cold, in order to listen to the most
+preposterous and impudent nonsense I ever heard."
+
+This was unjust. If he had heard me attentively from the first and
+avoided interruptions and not behaved like a submarine, we should
+have got through our little business in half the time. We might both
+have been dry and clothed by now.
+
+I endeavored to point this out to him.
+
+"Don't talk to me, sir," he roared, hobbling off across the beach to
+his dressing tent. "I will not listen to you. I will have nothing to
+do with you. I consider you impudent, sir."
+
+"I am sure it was unintentional, Mr. Derrick."
+
+"Isch!" he said--being the first occasion and the last on which I ever
+heard that remarkable word proceed from the mouth of man.
+
+And he vanished into his tent, while I, wading in once more, swam back
+to the Cob and put on my clothes.
+
+And so home, as Pepys would have said, to breakfast, feeling
+depressed.
+
+
+
+
+SCIENTIFIC GOLF
+
+XX
+
+
+As I stood with Ukridge in the fowl run on the morning following my
+maritime conversation with the professor, regarding a hen that had
+posed before us, obviously with a view to inspection, there appeared a
+man carrying an envelope.
+
+Ukridge, who by this time saw, as Calverley almost said, "under every
+hat a dun," and imagined that no envelope could contain anything but a
+small account, softly and silently vanished away, leaving me to
+interview the enemy.
+
+"Mr. Garnet, sir?" said the foe.
+
+I recognized him. He was Professor Derrick's gardener. What did this
+portend? Had the merits of my pleadings come home to the professor
+when he thought them over, and was there a father's blessing inclosed
+in the envelope which was being held out to me?
+
+I opened the envelope. No, father's blessings were absent. The letter
+was in the third person. Professor Derrick begged to inform Mr. Garnet
+that, by defeating Mr. Saul Potter, he had qualified for the final
+round of the Lyme Regis Golf Tournament, in which, he understood, Mr.
+Garnet was to be his opponent. If it would be convenient for Mr.
+Garnet to play off the match on the present afternoon, Professor
+Derrick would be obliged if he would be at the clubhouse at half-past
+two. If this hour and day were unsuitable, would he kindly arrange
+others. The bearer would wait.
+
+The bearer did wait, and then trudged off with a note, beautifully
+written in the third person, in which Mr. Garnet, after numerous
+compliments and thanks, begged to inform Professor Derrick that he
+would be at the clubhouse at the hour mentioned.
+
+"And," I added--to myself, not in the note--"I will give him such a
+licking that he'll brain himself with a cleek."
+
+For I was not pleased with the professor. I was conscious of a
+malicious joy at the prospect of snatching the prize from him. I knew
+he had set his heart on winning the tournament this year. To be
+runner-up two years in succession stimulates the desire for the first
+place. It would be doubly bitter to him to be beaten by a newcomer,
+after the absence of his rival, the colonel, had awakened hope in him.
+And I knew I could do it. Even allowing for bad luck--and I am never a
+very unlucky golfer--I could rely almost with certainty on crushing
+the man.
+
+"And I'll do it," I said to Bob, who had trotted up.
+
+I often make Bob the recipient of my confidences. He listens
+appreciatively and never interrupts. And he never has grievances of
+his own. If there is one person I dislike, it is the man who tries to
+air his grievances when I wish to air mine.
+
+"Bob," I said, running his tail through my fingers, "listen to me. If
+I am in form this afternoon, and I feel in my bones that I shall be, I
+shall nurse the professor. I shall play with him. Do you understand
+the principles of match play at golf, Robert? You score by holes, not
+strokes. There are eighteen holes. I shall toy with the professor,
+Bob. I shall let him get ahead, and then catch him up. I shall go
+ahead myself, and let him catch me up. I shall race him neck and neck
+till the very end. Then, when his hair has turned white with the
+strain, and he's lost a couple of stone in weight, and his eyes are
+starting out of his head, I shall go ahead and beat him by a hole.
+_I'll_ teach him, Robert. He shall taste of my despair, and learn by
+proof in some wild hour how much the wretched dare. And when it's all
+over, and he's torn all his hair out and smashed all his clubs, I
+shall go and commit suicide off the Cob. Because, you see, if I can't
+marry Phyllis, I shan't have any use for life."
+
+Bob wagged his tail cheerfully.
+
+"I mean it," I said, rolling him on his back and punching him on the
+chest till his breathing became stertorous. "You don't see the sense
+of it, I know. But then you've got none of the finer feelings. You're
+a jolly good dog, Robert, but you're a rank materialist. Bones and
+cheese and potatoes with gravy over them make you happy. You don't
+know what it is to be in love. You'd better get right side up now, or
+you'll have apoplexy."
+
+It has been my aim in the course of this narrative to extenuate
+nothing, nor set down aught in malice. Like the gentleman who played
+euchre with the heathen Chinee, I state but the facts. I do not,
+therefore, slur over my scheme for disturbing the professor's peace of
+mind. I am not always good and noble. I am the hero of this story, but
+I have my off moments.
+
+I felt ruthless toward the professor. I cannot plead ignorance of the
+golfer's point of view as an excuse for my plottings. I knew that to
+one whose soul is in the game, as the professor's was, the agony of
+being just beaten in an important match exceeds in bitterness all
+other agonies. I knew that if I scraped through by the smallest
+possible margin, his appetite would be destroyed, his sleep o' nights
+broken. He would wake from fitful slumber moaning that if he had only
+used his iron at the tenth hole all would have been well; that if he
+had aimed more carefully on the seventh green, life would not be drear
+and blank; that a more judicious manipulation of his brassy
+throughout might have given him something to live for. All these
+things I knew.
+
+And they did not touch me. I was adamant.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The professor was waiting for me at the clubhouse, and greeted me with
+a cold and stately inclination of the head.
+
+"Beautiful day for golf," I observed in my gay, chatty manner.
+
+He bowed in silence.
+
+"Very well," I thought. "Wait--just wait."
+
+"Miss Derrick is well, I hope?" I added aloud.
+
+That drew him. He started. His aspect became doubly forbidding.
+
+"Miss Derrick is perfectly well, sir, I thank you."
+
+"And you? No bad effect, I hope, from your dip yesterday?"
+
+"Mr. Garnet, I came here for golf, not conversation," he said.
+
+We made it so. I drove off from the first tee. It was a splendid
+drive. I should not say so if there were anyone else to say so for me.
+Modesty would forbid. But, as there is no one, I must repeat the
+statement. It was one of the best drives of my experience. The ball
+flashed through the air, took the bunker with a dozen feet to spare,
+and rolled onto the green. I had felt all along that I should be in
+form. Unless my opponent was equally above himself, he was a lost man.
+
+The excellence of my drive had not been without its effect on the
+professor. I could see that he was not confident. He addressed his
+ball more strangely and at greater length than anyone I had ever seen.
+He waggled his club over it as if he were going to perform a conjuring
+trick. Then he struck and topped it.
+
+The ball rolled two yards.
+
+He looked at it in silence. Then he looked at me--also in silence.
+
+I was gazing seaward.
+
+When I looked round, he was getting to work with a brassy.
+
+This time he hit the bunker and rolled back. He repeated this maneuver
+twice.
+
+"Hard luck!" I murmured sympathetically on the third occasion, thereby
+going as near to being slain with an iron as it has ever been my lot
+to go. Your true golfer is easily roused in times of misfortune, and
+there was a red gleam in the eye the professor turned to me.
+
+"I shall pick my ball up," he growled.
+
+We walked on in silence to the second tee.
+
+He did the second hole in four, which was good. I won it in three,
+which--unfortunately for him--was better.
+
+I won the third hole.
+
+I won the fourth hole.
+
+I won the fifth hole.
+
+I glanced at my opponent out of the corner of my eyes. The man was
+suffering. Beads of perspiration stood out on his forehead.
+
+His play had become wilder and wilder at each hole in arithmetical
+progression. If he had been a plow, he could hardly have turned up
+more soil. The imagination recoiled from the thought of what he would
+be doing in another half hour if he deteriorated at his present speed.
+
+A feeling of calm and content stole over me. I was not sorry for him.
+All the viciousness of my nature was uppermost in me. Once, when he
+missed the ball clean at the fifth tee, his eye met mine, and we stood
+staring at each other for a full half minute without moving. I believe
+if I had smiled then, he would have attacked me without hesitation.
+There is a type of golfer who really almost ceases to be human under
+stress of the wild agony of a series of foozles.
+
+The sixth hole involves the player in a somewhat tricky piece of
+cross-country work. There is a nasty ditch to be negotiated. Many an
+optimist has been reduced to blank pessimism by that ditch. "All hope
+abandon, ye who enter here," might be written on a notice board over
+it.
+
+The professor "entered there." The unhappy man sent his ball into its
+very jaws. And then madness seized him. The merciful laws of golf,
+framed by kindly men who do not wish to see the asylums of Great
+Britain overcrowded, enact that in such a case the player may take his
+ball and throw it over his shoulder. The same to count as one stroke.
+But vaulting ambition is apt to try and drive out from the ditch,
+thinking thereby to win through without losing a stroke. This way
+madness lies.
+
+It was a grisly sight to see the professor, head and shoulders above
+the ditch, hewing at his obstinate Haskell.
+
+"_Sixteen_!" said the professor at last between his teeth. Then,
+having made one or two further comments, he stooped and picked up his
+ball.
+
+"I give you this hole," he said.
+
+We walked on.
+
+I won the seventh hole.
+
+I won the eighth hole.
+
+The ninth we halved, for in the black depth of my soul I had formed a
+plan of fiendish subtlety. I intended to allow him to win--with
+extreme labor--eight holes in succession.
+
+Then, when hope was once more strong in him, I would win the last, and
+he would go mad.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+I watched him carefully as we trudged on. Emotions chased one another
+across his face. When he won the tenth hole he merely refrained from
+oaths. When he won the eleventh a sort of sullen pleasure showed in
+his face. It was at the thirteenth that I detected the first dawning
+of hope. From then onward it grew. When, with a sequence of shocking
+shots, he took the seventeenth hole in eight, he was in a parlous
+condition. His run of success had engendered within him a desire for
+conversation. He wanted, as it were, to flap his wings and crow. I
+could see dignity wrestling with talkativeness.
+
+I gave him a lead.
+
+"You have got back your form now," I said.
+
+Talkativeness had it. Dignity retired hurt. Speech came from him with
+a rush. When he brought off an excellent drive from the eighteenth
+tee, he seemed to forget everything.
+
+"Me dear boy--" he began, and stopped abruptly in some confusion.
+Silence once more brooded over us as we played ourselves up the
+fairway and on to the green.
+
+He was on the green in four. I reached it in three. His sixth stroke
+took him out.
+
+I putted carefully to the very mouth of the hole.
+
+I walked up to my ball and paused. I looked at the professor. He
+looked at me.
+
+"Go on," he said hoarsely.
+
+Suddenly a wave of compassion flooded over me. What right had I to
+torture the man like this? He had not behaved well to me, but in the
+main it was my fault. In his place I should have acted in precisely
+the same way. In a flash I made up my mind.
+
+"Professor," I said.
+
+"Go on," he repeated.
+
+"That looks a simple shot," I said, eyeing him steadily, "but I might
+easily miss it."
+
+He started.
+
+"And then you would win the championship."
+
+He dabbed at his forehead with a wet ball of a handkerchief.
+
+"It would be very pleasant for you after getting so near it the last
+two years."
+
+"Go on," he said for the third time. But there was a note of
+hesitation in his voice.
+
+"Sudden joy," I said, "would almost certainly make me miss it."
+
+We looked at each other. He had the golf fever in his eyes.
+
+"If," I said slowly, lifting my putter, "you were to give your consent
+to my marriage with Phyllis--"
+
+He looked from me to the ball, from the ball to me, and back again to
+the ball. It was very, very near the hole.
+
+"I love her," I said, "and I have discovered she loves me.... I shall
+be a rich man from the day I marry--"
+
+His eyes were still fixed on the ball.
+
+"Why not?" I said.
+
+He looked up, and burst into a roar of laughter.
+
+"You young divil," said he, smiting his thigh, "you young divil,
+you've beaten me."
+
+I swung my putter, and drove the ball far beyond the green.
+
+"On the contrary," I said, "you have beaten me."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+I left the professor at the clubhouse and raced back to the farm. I
+wanted to pour my joys into a sympathetic ear. Ukridge, I knew, would
+offer that same sympathetic ear. A good fellow, Ukridge. Always
+interested in what you had to tell him--never bored.
+
+"Ukridge," I shouted.
+
+No answer.
+
+I flung open the dining-room door. Nobody.
+
+I went into the drawing-room. It was empty.
+
+I searched through the garden, and looked into his bedroom. He was not
+in either.
+
+"He must have gone for a stroll," I said.
+
+I rang the bell.
+
+The hired retainer appeared, calm and imperturbable as ever.
+
+"Sir?"
+
+"Oh, where is Mr. Ukridge, Beale?"
+
+"Mr. Ukridge, sir," said the hired retainer nonchalantly, "has gone."
+
+"Gone!"
+
+"Yes, sir. Mr. Ukridge and Mrs. Ukridge went away together by the
+three o'clock train."
+
+
+
+
+THE CALM BEFORE THE STORM
+
+XXI
+
+
+"Beale," I said, "what do you mean? Where have they gone?"
+
+"Don't know, sir. London, I expect."
+
+"When did they go? Oh, you told me that. Didn't they say why they were
+going?"
+
+"No, sir."
+
+"Didn't you ask? When you saw them packing up and going to the
+station, didn't you do anything?"
+
+"No, sir."
+
+"Why on earth not?"
+
+"I didn't see them, sir. I only found out as they'd gone after they'd
+been and went, sir. Walking down by the 'Net and Mackerel,' met one
+of them coastguards. 'Oh,' says he, 'so you're moving?' 'Who's
+a-moving?' I says to him. 'Well,' he says to me, 'I seen your Mr.
+Ukridge and his missus get into the three o'clock train for Axminster.
+I thought as you was all a-moving.' 'Ho!' I says, 'Ho!' wondering, and
+I goes on. When I gets back, I asks the missus did she see them
+packing their boxes, and she says, 'No,' she says, they didn't pack no
+boxes as she knowed of. And blowed if they had, Mr. Garnet, sir."
+
+"What, they didn't pack!"
+
+"No, sir."
+
+We looked at one another.
+
+"Beale," I said.
+
+"Sir?"
+
+"Do you know what I think?"
+
+"Yes, sir."
+
+"They've bolted."
+
+"So I says to the missus, sir. It struck me right off, in a manner of
+speaking."
+
+"This is awful," I said.
+
+"Yes, sir."
+
+His face betrayed no emotion, but he was one of those men whose
+expression never varies. It's a way they have in the army.
+
+"This wants thinking out, Beale," I said.
+
+"Yes, sir."
+
+"You'd better ask Mrs. Beale to give me some dinner, and then I'll
+think it out."
+
+"Yes, sir."
+
+I was in an unpleasant position. Ukridge, by his defection, had left
+me in charge of the farm. I could dissolve the concern, I supposed, if
+I wished, and return to London; but I particularly desired to remain
+in Lyme Regis. To complete the victory I had won on the links, it was
+necessary for me to continue as I had begun. I was in the position of
+a general who has conquered a hostile country, and is obliged to
+soothe the feelings of the conquered people before his labors can be
+considered at an end. I had rushed the professor. It must now be my
+aim to keep him from regretting that he had been rushed. I must,
+therefore, stick to my post with the tenacity of a boy on a burning
+deck. There would be trouble. Of that I was certain. As soon as the
+news got about that Ukridge had gone, the deluge would begin. His
+creditors would abandon their passive tactics and take active steps.
+The siege of Port Arthur would be nothing to it. There was a chance
+that aggressive measures would be confined to the enemy at our gates,
+the tradesmen of Lyme Regis. But the probability was that the news
+would spread and the injured merchants of Dorchester and Axminster
+rush to the scene of hostilities. I foresaw unpleasantness.
+
+I summoned Beale after dinner and held a council of war. It was no
+time for airy persiflage.
+
+I said, "Beale, we're in the cart."
+
+"Sir?"
+
+"Mr. Ukridge going away like this has left me in a most unpleasant
+position. I would like to talk it over with you. I dare say you know
+that we--that Mr. Ukridge owes a considerable amount of money
+roundabout here to tradesmen?"
+
+"Yes, sir."
+
+"Well, when they find out that he has--er--"
+
+"Shot the moon, sir," suggested the hired retainer helpfully.
+
+"Gone up to town," I said. "When they find that he has gone up to
+town, they are likely to come bothering us a good deal."
+
+"Yes, sir."
+
+"I fancy that we shall have them all round here by the day after
+to-morrow at the latest. Probably earlier. News of this sort always
+spreads quickly. The point is, then, what are we to do?"
+
+He propounded no scheme, but stood in an easy attitude of attention,
+waiting for me to continue.
+
+I continued.
+
+"Let's see exactly how we stand," I said. "My point is that I
+particularly wish to go on living down here for at least another
+fortnight. Of course, my position is simple. I am Mr. Ukridge's guest.
+I shall go on living as I have been doing up to the present. He asked
+me down here to help him look after the fowls, so I shall go on
+looking after them. I shall want a chicken a day, I suppose, or
+perhaps two, for my meals, and there the thing ends, as far I am
+concerned. Complications set in when we come to consider you and Mrs.
+Beale. I suppose you won't care to stop on after this?"
+
+The hired retainer scratched his chin and glanced out of the window.
+The moon was up and the garden looked cool and mysterious in the dim
+light.
+
+"It's a pretty place, Mr. Garnet, sir," he said.
+
+"It is," I said, "but about other considerations? There's the matter
+of wages. Are yours in arrears?"
+
+"Yes, sir. A month."
+
+"And Mrs. Beale's the same, I suppose?"
+
+"Yes, sir. A month."
+
+"H'm. Well, it seems to me, Beale, you can't lose anything by stopping
+on."
+
+"I can't be paid any less than I have been, sir," he agreed.
+
+"Exactly. And, as you say, it's a pretty place. You might just as well
+stop on and help me in the fowl run. What do you think?"
+
+"Very well, sir."
+
+"And Mrs. Beale will do the same?"
+
+"Yes, sir."
+
+"That's excellent. You're a hero, Beale. I sha'n't forget you. There's
+a check coming to me from a magazine in another week for a short
+story. When it arrives I'll look into that matter of back wages. Tell
+Mrs. Beale I'm much obliged to her, will you?"
+
+"Yes, sir."
+
+Having concluded that delicate business, I strolled out into the
+garden with Bob. It was abominable of Ukridge to desert me in this
+way. Even if I had not been his friend, it would have been bad. The
+fact that we had known each other for years made it doubly
+discreditable. He might at least have warned me and given me the
+option of leaving the sinking ship with him.
+
+But, I reflected, I ought not to be surprised. His whole career, as
+long as I had known him, had been dotted with little eccentricities of
+a type which an unfeeling world generally stigmatizes as shady. They
+were small things, it was true; but they ought to have warned me. We
+are most of us wise after the event. When the wind has blown we
+generally discover a multitude of straws which should have shown us
+which way it was blowing.
+
+Once, I remembered, in our school-master days, when guineas, though
+regular, were few, he had had occasion to increase his wardrobe. If I
+recollect rightly, he thought he had a chance of a good position in
+the tutoring line, and only needed good clothes to make it his. He
+took four pounds of his salary in advance--he was in the habit of
+doing this; he never had any of his salary left by the end of term, it
+having vanished in advance loans beforehand. With this he was to buy
+two suits, a hat, new boots, and collars. When it came to making the
+purchases, he found, what he had overlooked previously in his
+optimistic way, that four pounds did not go very far. At the time, I
+remember, I thought his method of grappling with the situation
+humorous. He bought a hat for three and sixpence, and got the suits
+and the boots on the installment system, paying a small sum in
+advance, as earnest of more to come. He then pawned one suit to pay
+the first few installments, and finally departed, to be known no more.
+His address he had given, with a false name, at an empty house, and
+when the tailor arrived with the minions of the law, all he found was
+an annoyed caretaker and a pile of letters written by himself,
+containing his bill in its various stages of evolution.
+
+Or again. There was a bicycle and photograph shop near the school. He
+blew into this one day and his roving eye fell on a tandem bicycle. He
+did not want a tandem bicycle, but that influenced him not at all. He
+ordered it, provisionally. He also ordered an enlarging camera, a
+Kodak, and a magic lantern. The order was booked and the goods were to
+be delivered when he had made up his mind concerning them. After a
+week the shopman sent round to ask if there were any further
+particulars which Mr. Ukridge would like to learn before definitely
+ordering them. Mr. Ukridge sent word back that he was considering the
+matter, and that in the meantime would he be so good as to let him
+have that little clockwork man in his window, which walked when wound
+up? Having got this, and not paid for it, Ukridge thought that he had
+done handsomely by the bicycle and photograph man, and that things
+were square between them. The latter met him a few days afterwards and
+expostulated plaintively. Ukridge explained. "My good man," he said,
+"you know, I really think we need say no more about the matter.
+Really, you've come out of it very well. Now, look here, which would
+you rather be owed for? A clockwork man, which is broken, and you can
+have it back, or a tandem bicycle, an enlarging camera, a Kodak, and
+a magic lantern? What?" His reasoning was too subtle for the
+uneducated mind. The man retired, puzzled and unpaid, and Ukridge kept
+the clockwork toy.
+
+A remarkable financier, Ukridge. I sometimes think that he would have
+done well in the city.
+
+I did not go to bed till late that night. There was something so
+peaceful in the silence that brooded over everything that I stayed on,
+enjoying it. Perhaps it struck me as all the more peaceful because I
+could not help thinking of the troublous times that were to come.
+Already I seemed to hear the horrid roar of a herd of infuriated
+creditors. I seemed to see fierce brawlings and sackings in progress
+in this very garden.
+
+"It will be a coarse, brutal spectacle, Robert," I said.
+
+Bob uttered a little whine, as if he, too, were endowed with powers of
+prophecy.
+
+
+
+
+THE STORM BREAKS
+
+XXII
+
+
+Rather to my surprise, the next morning passed off uneventfully. By
+lunch time I had come to the conclusion that the expected trouble
+would not occur that day, and I felt that I might well leave my post
+for the afternoon while I went to the professor's to pay my respects.
+
+The professor was out when I arrived. Phyllis was in, and as we had a
+good many things of no importance to say to each other, it was not
+till the evening that I started for the farm again.
+
+As I approached the sound of voices smote my ears.
+
+I stopped. I could hear Beale speaking. Then came the rich notes of
+Vickers, the butcher. Then Beale again. Then Dawlish, the grocer.
+Then a chorus.
+
+The storm had burst, and in my absence.
+
+I blushed for myself. I was in command, and I had deserted the fort in
+time of need. What must the faithful hired man be thinking of me?
+Probably he placed me, as he had placed Ukridge, in the ragged ranks
+of those who have shot the moon.
+
+Fortunately, having just come from the professor's, I was in the
+costume which of all my wardrobe was most calculated to impress. To a
+casual observer I should probably suggest wealth and respectability. I
+stopped for a moment to cool myself, for, as is my habit when pleased
+with life, I had been walking fast, then I opened the gate and strode
+in, trying to look as opulent as possible.
+
+It was an animated scene that met my eyes. In the middle of the lawn
+stood the devoted Beale, a little more flushed than I had seen him
+hitherto, parleying with a burly and excited young man without a coat.
+Grouped round the pair were some dozen men, young, middle-aged, and
+old, all talking their hardest. I could distinguish nothing of what
+they were saying. I noticed that Beale's left cheek bone was a little
+discolored, and there was a hard, dogged expression on his face. He,
+too, was in his shirt sleeves.
+
+My entry created no sensation. Nobody, apparently, had heard the latch
+click, and nobody had caught sight of me. Their eyes were fixed on the
+young man and Beale. I stood at the gate and watched them.
+
+There seemed to have been trouble already. Looking more closely I
+perceived sitting on the grass apart a second young man. His face was
+obscured by a dirty pocket handkerchief, with which he dabbed tenderly
+at his features. Every now and then the shirt-sleeved young man flung
+his hand toward him with an indignant gesture, talking hard the
+while. It did not need a preternaturally keen observer to deduce what
+had happened. Beale must have fallen out with the young man who was
+sitting on the grass and smitten him, and now his friend had taken up
+the quarrel.
+
+"Now this," I said to myself, "is rather interesting. Here in this one
+farm we have the only three known methods of dealing with duns. Beale
+is evidently an exponent of the violent method. Ukridge is an apostle
+of evasion. I shall try conciliation. I wonder which of us will be the
+most successful."
+
+Meanwhile, not to spoil Beale's efforts by allowing him too little
+scope for experiment, I refrained from making my presence known, and
+continued to stand by the gate, an interested spectator.
+
+Things were evidently moving now. The young man's gestures became
+more vigorous. The dogged look on Beale's face deepened. The comments
+of the ring increased in point and pungency.
+
+"What did you hit him for, then?"
+
+This question was put, always in the same words and with the same air
+of quiet triumph, at intervals of thirty seconds by a little man in a
+snuff-colored suit with a purple tie. Nobody ever answered him or
+appeared to listen to him, but he seemed each time to think that he
+had clinched the matter and cornered his opponent.
+
+Other voices chimed in.
+
+"You hit him, Charlie. Go on. You hit him."
+
+"We'll have the law."
+
+"Go on, Charlie."
+
+Flushed with the favor of the many-headed, Charlie now proceeded from
+threats to action. His right fist swung round suddenly. But Beale was
+on the alert. He ducked sharply, and the next minute Charlie was
+sitting on the ground beside his fallen friend. A hush fell on the
+ring, and the little man in the purple tie was left repeating his
+formula without support.
+
+I advanced. It seemed to me that the time had come to be conciliatory.
+Charlie was struggling to his feet, obviously anxious for a second
+round, and Beale was getting into position once more. In another five
+minutes conciliation would be out of the question.
+
+"What's all this?" I said.
+
+My advent caused a stir. Excited men left Beale and rallied round me.
+Charlie, rising to his feet, found himself dethroned from his position
+of man of the moment, and stood blinking at the setting sun and
+opening and shutting his mouth. There was a buzz of conversation.
+
+"Don't all speak at once, please," I said. "I can't possibly follow
+what you say. Perhaps you will tell me what you want?"
+
+I singled out a short, stout man in gray. He wore the largest whiskers
+ever seen on human face.
+
+"It's like this, sir. We all of us want to know where we are."
+
+"I can tell you that," I said, "you're on our lawn, and I should be
+much obliged if you would stop digging your heels into it."
+
+This was not, I suppose, conciliation in the strictest and best sense
+of the word, but the thing had to be said.
+
+"You don't understand me, sir," he said excitedly. "When I said we
+didn't know where we were, it was a manner of speaking. We want to
+know how we stand."
+
+"On your heels," I replied gently, "as I pointed out before."
+
+"I am Brass, sir, of Axminster. My account with Mr. Ukridge is ten
+pounds eight shillings and fourpence. I want to know--"
+
+The whole strength of the company now joined in.
+
+"You know me, Mr. Garnet. Appleby, in the High--" (voice lost in the
+general roar) "... and eightpence."
+
+"My account with Mr. Uk----"
+
+"... settle--"
+
+"I represent Bodger--"
+
+A diversion occurred at this point. Charlie, who had long been eyeing
+Beale sourly, dashed at him with swinging fists and was knocked down
+again. The whole trend of the meeting altered once more. Conciliation
+became a drug. Violence was what the public wanted. Beale had three
+fights in rapid succession. I was helpless. Instinct prompted me to
+join the fray, but prudence told me that such a course would be fatal.
+
+At last, in a lull, I managed to catch the hired retainer by the arm
+as he drew back from the prostrate form of his latest victim.
+
+"Drop it, Beale," I whispered hotly, "drop it. We shall never manage
+these people if you knock them about. Go indoors and stay there while
+I talk to them."
+
+"Mr. Garnet, sir," said he, the light of battle dying out of his eyes,
+"it's 'ard. It's cruel 'ard. I ain't 'ad a turn-up, not to _call_ a
+turn-up, since I've bin a time-expired man. I ain't hitting of 'em,
+Mr. Garnet, sir, not hard I ain't. That there first one of 'em he
+played me dirty, hittin' at me when I wasn't looking. They can't say
+as I started it."
+
+"That's all right, Beale," I said soothingly. "I know it wasn't your
+fault, and I know it's hard on you to have to stop, but I wish you
+would go indoors. I must talk to these men, and we sha'n't have a
+moment's peace while you're here. Cut along."
+
+"Very well, sir. But it's 'ard. Mayn't I 'ave just one go at that
+Charlie, Mr. Garnet?" he asked wistfully.
+
+"No, no. Go in."
+
+"And if they goes for you, sir, and tries to wipe the face off you?"
+
+"They won't, they won't. If they do, I'll shout for you."
+
+He went reluctantly into the house, and I turned again to my audience.
+
+"If you will kindly be quiet for a moment--" I said.
+
+"I am Appleby, Mr. Garnet, in the High Street. Mr. Ukridge--"
+
+"Eighteen pounds fourteen shillings--"
+
+"Kindly glance--"
+
+I waved my hands wildly above my head.
+
+"Stop! Stop! Stop!" I shouted.
+
+The babble continued, but diminished gradually in volume. Through the
+trees, as I waited, I caught a glimpse of the sea. I wished I was out
+on the Cob, where beyond these voices there was peace. My head was
+beginning to ache, and I felt faint for want of food.
+
+"Gentlemen!" I cried, as the noise died away.
+
+The latch of the gate clicked. I looked up and saw a tall thin young
+man in a frock coat and silk hat enter the garden. It was the first
+time I had seen the costume in the country.
+
+He approached me.
+
+"Mr. Ukridge, sir?" he said.
+
+"My name is Garnet. Mr. Ukridge is away at the moment."
+
+"I come from Whiteley's, Mr. Garnet. Our Mr. Blenkinsop having written
+on several occasions to Mr. Ukridge, calling his attention to the fact
+that his account has been allowed to mount to a considerable figure,
+and having received no satisfactory reply, desired me to visit him. I
+am sorry that he is not at home."
+
+"So am I," I said with feeling.
+
+"Do you expect him to return shortly?"
+
+"No," I said, "I do not."
+
+He was looking curiously at the expectant band of duns. I forestalled
+his question.
+
+"Those are some of Mr. Ukridge's creditors," I said. "I am just about
+to address them. Perhaps you will take a seat. The grass is quite dry.
+My remarks will embrace you as well as them."
+
+Comprehension came into his eyes, and the natural man in him peeped
+through the polish.
+
+"Great Scott, has he done a bunk?" he cried.
+
+"To the best of my knowledge, yes," I said.
+
+He whistled.
+
+I turned again to the local talent.
+
+"Gentlemen!" I shouted.
+
+"Hear, hear!" said some idiot.
+
+"Gentlemen, I intend to be quite frank with you. We must decide just
+how matters stand between us." (A voice: "Where's Ukridge?") "Mr.
+Ukridge left for London suddenly (bitter laughter) yesterday
+afternoon. Personally I think he will come back very shortly."
+
+Hoots of derision greeted this prophecy.
+
+I resumed:
+
+"I fail to see your object in coming here. I have nothing for you. I
+couldn't pay your bills if I wanted to."
+
+It began to be borne in upon me that I was becoming unpopular.
+
+"I am here simply as Mr. Ukridge's guest," I proceeded. After all, why
+should I spare the man? "I have nothing whatever to do with his
+business affairs. I refuse absolutely to be regarded as in any way
+indebted to you. I am sorry for you. You have my sympathy. That is all
+I can give you, sympathy--and good advice."
+
+Dissatisfaction. I was getting myself disliked. And I had meant to be
+so conciliatory, to speak to these unfortunates words of cheer which
+should be as olive oil poured into a wound. For I really did
+sympathize with them. I considered that Ukridge had used them
+disgracefully. But I was irritated. My head ached abominably.
+
+"Then am I to tell our Mr. Blenkinsop," asked the frock-coated one,
+"that the money is not and will not be forthcoming?"
+
+"When next you smoke a quiet cigar with your Mr. Blenkinsop," I
+replied courteously, "and find conversation flagging, I rather think I
+_should_ say something of the sort."
+
+"We shall, of course, instruct our solicitors at once to institute
+legal proceedings against your Mr. Ukridge."
+
+"Don't call him my Mr. Ukridge. You can do whatever you please."
+
+"That is your last word on the subject."
+
+"I hope so."
+
+"Where's our money?" demanded a discontented voice from the crowd.
+
+Then Charlie, filled with the lust of revenge, proposed that the
+company should sack the place.
+
+"We can't see the color of our money," he said pithily, "but we can
+have our own back."
+
+That settled it. The battle was over. The most skillful general must
+sometimes recognize defeat. I could do nothing further with them. I
+had done my best for the farm. I could do no more.
+
+I lit my pipe and strolled into the paddock.
+
+Chaos followed. Indoors and out of doors they raged without check.
+Even Beale gave the thing up. He knocked Charlie into a flower bed and
+then disappeared in the direction of the kitchen.
+
+It was growing dusk. From inside the house came faint sounds of mirth,
+as the sacking party emptied the rooms of their contents. In the fowl
+run a hen was crooning sleepily in its coop. It was a very soft,
+liquid, soothing sound.
+
+Presently out came the invaders with their loot--one with a picture,
+another with a vase, another bearing the gramophone upside down.
+
+Then I heard somebody--Charlie again, it seemed to me--propose a raid
+on the fowl run.
+
+The fowls had had their moments of unrest since they had been our
+property, but what they had gone through with us was peace compared
+with what befell them then. Not even on that second evening of our
+visit, when we had run unmeasured miles in pursuit of them, had there
+been such confusion. Roused abruptly from their beauty sleep, they
+fled in all directions. The summer evening was made hideous with the
+noise of them.
+
+"Disgraceful, sir. Is it not disgraceful!" said a voice at my ear.
+
+The young man from Whiteley's stood beside me. He did not look happy.
+His forehead was damp. Somebody seemed to have stepped on his hat and
+his coat was smeared with mold.
+
+I was turning to answer him, when from the dusk in the direction of
+the house came a sudden roar. A passionate appeal to the world in
+general to tell the speaker what all this meant.
+
+There was only one man of my acquaintance with a voice like that. I
+walked without hurry toward him.
+
+"Good evening, Ukridge," I said.
+
+
+
+
+AFTER THE STORM
+
+XXIII
+
+
+A yell of welcome drowned the tumult of the looters.
+
+"Is that you, Garny, old horse? What's up? What's the matter? Has
+everybody gone mad? Who are those blackguardly scoundrels in the fowl
+run? What are they doing? What's been happening?"
+
+"I have been entertaining a little meeting of your creditors," I said.
+"And now they are entertaining themselves."
+
+"But what did you let them do it for?"
+
+"What is one among so many?" I said.
+
+"Oh," moaned Ukridge, as a hen flashed past us, pursued by a criminal,
+"it's a little hard. I can't go away for a day--"
+
+"You can't," I said. "You're right there. You can't go away without a
+word--"
+
+"Without a word? What do you mean? Garny, old boy, pull yourself
+together. You're overexcited. Do you mean to tell me you didn't get my
+note?"
+
+"What note?"
+
+"The one I left on the dining-room table."
+
+"There was no note there."
+
+"What!"
+
+I was reminded of the scene that had taken place on the first day of
+our visit.
+
+"Feel in your pockets," I said.
+
+And history repeated itself. One of the first things he pulled out was
+the note.
+
+"Why, here it is!" he said in amazement.
+
+"Of course. Where did you expect it to be? Was it important?"
+
+"Why, it explained the whole thing."
+
+"Then," I said, "I wish you'd let me read it. A note that can explain
+what's happened ought to be worth reading."
+
+I took the envelope from his hand and opened it.
+
+It was too dark to read, so I lit a match. A puff of wind extinguished
+it. There is always just enough wind to extinguish a match.
+
+I pocketed the note.
+
+"I can't read it now," I said. "Tell me what it was about."
+
+"It was telling you to sit tight and not to worry about us going
+away--"
+
+"That's good about worrying. You're a thoughtful chap, Ukridge."
+
+"--because we should be back in a day or two."
+
+"And what sent you up to town?"
+
+"Why, we went to touch Millie's Aunt Elizabeth."
+
+A light began to shine on my darkness.
+
+"Oh!" I said.
+
+"You remember Aunt Elizabeth? We got a letter from her not so long
+ago."
+
+"I know whom you mean. She called you a gaby."
+
+"And a guffin."
+
+"Of course. I remember thinking her a shrewd and discriminating old
+lady, with a great gift of description. So you went to touch her?"
+
+"That's it. I suddenly found that things were getting into an A1
+tangle, and that we must have more money. So I naturally thought of
+Aunt Elizabeth. She isn't what you might call an admirer of mine, but
+she's very fond of Millie, and would do anything for her if she's
+allowed to chuck about a few home-truths before doing it. So we went
+off together, looked her up at her house, stated our painful case, and
+corralled the money. Millie and I shared the work. She did the asking,
+while I inquired after the rheumatism. She mentioned the precise
+figure that would clear us. I patted the toy Pomeranian. Little beast!
+Got after me quick, when I wasn't looking, and chewed my ankle."
+
+"Thank Heaven for that," I said.
+
+"In the end Millie got the money and I got the home truths."
+
+"Did she call you a gaby?"
+
+"Twice. And a guffin three times."
+
+"But you got the money?"
+
+"Rather. And I'll tell you another thing. I scored heavily at the end
+of the visit. Lady Lakenheath was doing stunts with proverbs--"
+
+"I beg your pardon?"
+
+"Quoting proverbs, you know, bearing on the situation. 'Ah, my dear,'
+she said to Millie, 'marry in haste, repent at leisure!' 'I'm afraid
+that proverb doesn't apply to us,' said Millie, 'because I haven't
+repented.' What do you think of that, old horse?"
+
+"Millie's an angel," I replied.
+
+Just then the angel joined us. She had been exploring the house, and
+noting the damage done. Her eyes were open to their fullest extent as
+she shook hands with me.
+
+"Oh, Mr. Garnet," she said, "_couldn't_ you have stopped them?"
+
+I felt a cur. Had I done as much as I might have done to stem the
+tide?
+
+"I'm awfully sorry, Mrs. Ukridge," I said. "I really don't think I
+could have done more. We tried every method. Beale had seven fights,
+and I made a speech on the lawn, but it was all no good."
+
+"Perhaps we can collect these men and explain things," I added. "I
+don't believe any of them know you've come back."
+
+"Send Beale round," said Ukridge. "Beale!"
+
+The hired retainer came running out at the sound of the well-known
+voice.
+
+"Lumme, Mr. Ukridge, sir!" he gasped.
+
+It was the first time Beale had ever betrayed any real emotion in my
+presence. To him, I suppose, the return of Ukridge was as sensational
+and astounding an event as the reappearance of one from the tomb would
+have been. He was not accustomed to find those who had shot the moon
+revisiting their old haunts.
+
+"Go round the place and tell those blackguards that I've come back,
+and would like to have a word with them on the lawn. And if you find
+any of them stealing my fowls, knock them down."
+
+"I 'ave knocked down one or two," said Beale with approval. "That
+Charlie--"
+
+"That's right, Beale. You're an excellent man, and I will pay you your
+back wages to-night before I go to bed."
+
+"Those fellers, sir," said Beale, having expressed his gratification,
+"they've been and scattered most of them birds already, sir. They've
+been chasin' of 'em for this hour back."
+
+Ukridge groaned.
+
+"Demons!" he said. "Demons!"
+
+Beale went off.
+
+The audience assembled on the lawn in the moonlight. Ukridge, with his
+cap well over his eyes and his mackintosh hanging around him like a
+Roman toga, surveyed them stonily, and finally began his speech.
+
+"You--you--you--you blackguards!" he said.
+
+I always like to think of Ukridge as he appeared at that moment. There
+have been times when his conduct did not recommend itself to me. It
+has sometimes happened that I have seen flaws in him. But on this
+occasion he was at his best. He was eloquent. He dominated his
+audience.
+
+He poured scorn upon his hearers, and they quailed. He flung invective
+at them, and they wilted.
+
+It was hard, he said, it was a little hard that a gentleman could not
+run up to London for a couple of days on business without having his
+private grounds turned upside down. He had intended to deal well by
+the tradesmen of the town, to put business in their way, to give them
+large orders. But would he? Not much. As soon as ever the sun had
+risen and another day begun, their miserable accounts should be paid
+in full and their connection with him be cut off. Afterwards it was
+probable that he would institute legal proceedings against them for
+trespass and damage to property, and if they didn't all go to prison
+they might consider themselves uncommonly lucky, and if they didn't
+fly the spot within the brief space of two ticks he would get among
+them with a shotgun. He was sick of them. They were no gentlemen, but
+cads. Scoundrels. Creatures that it would be rank flattery to describe
+as human beings. That's the sort of things _they_ were. And now they
+might go--_quick_!
+
+The meeting then dispersed, without the usual vote of thanks.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+We were quiet at the farm that night. Ukridge sat like Marius among
+the ruins of Carthage and refused to speak. Eventually he took Bob
+with him and went for a walk.
+
+Half an hour later I, too, wearied of the scene of desolation. My
+errant steps took me in the direction of the sea. As I approached I
+was aware of a figure standing in the moonlight, gazing moodily out
+over the waters. Beside the figure was a dog.
+
+I would not disturb his thoughts. The dark moments of massive minds
+are sacred. I forebore to speak to him. As readily might one of the
+generals of the Grand Army have opened conversation with Napoleon
+during the retreat from Moscow.
+
+I turned softly and walked the other way. When I looked back he was
+still there.
+
+[Illustration: "I did think Mr. Garnet would have fainted when the
+best man said, 'I can't find it, old horse!'"]
+
+
+
+
+EPILOGUE
+
+
+ARGUMENT. From the _Morning Post: "... and graceful, wore a simple
+gown of stiff satin and old lace, and a heavy lace veil fell in soft
+folds over the shimmering skirt. A reception was subsequently held by
+Mrs. O'Brien, aunt of the bride, at her house in Ennismore Gardens."_
+
+
+IN THE SERVANTS' HALL
+
+THE COOK. ... And as pretty a wedding, Mr. Hill, as ever I did see.
+
+THE BUTLER. Indeed, Mrs. Minchley? And how did our niece look?
+
+THE COOK (_closing her eyes in silent rapture_). Well,
+_there_! That lace! (_In a burst of ecstacy_.) Well, _there_!!
+Words can't describe it, Mr. Hill.
+
+THE BUTLER. Indeed, Mrs. Minchley?
+
+THE COOK. And Miss Phyllis--Mrs. Garnet, I _should_ say--she was as
+calm as calm. And looking beautiful as--well, there! Now, Mr. Garnet,
+he _did_ look nervous, if you like, and when the best man--such a
+queer-looking awkward man, in a frock coat that _I_ wouldn't have been
+best man at a wedding in--when he lost the ring and said--quite loud,
+everybody could hear him--"I can't find it, old horse!" why I did
+think Mr. Garnet would have fainted away, and so I said to Jane, as
+was sitting beside me. But he found it at the last moment, and all
+went on as merrily, as you may say, as a wedding bell.
+
+JANE (_sentimentally_). Reely, these weddings, you know, they do give
+you a sort of feeling, if you catch my meaning, Mrs. Minchley.
+
+THE BUTLER (_with the air of a high priest who condescends for once to
+unbend and frolic with lesser mortals_). Ah! it'll be your turn next,
+Miss Jane.
+
+JANE (_who has long had designs on this dignified bachelor_). Oh, Mr.
+Hill, reely! You do poke your fun.
+
+   [_Raises her eyes to his, and drops them swiftly, leaving him
+   with a pleasant sensation of having said a good thing
+   particularly neatly, and a growing idea that he might do
+   worse than marry Jane, take a nice little house in Chelsea
+   somewhere, and let lodgings. He thinks it over._
+
+TILBY (_a flighty young person who, when she has a moment or two to
+spare from the higher flirtation with the local policeman, puts in a
+little light work about the bedrooms_). Oh, I say, this'll be one in
+the eye for Riggetts, pore little feller. (_Assuming an air of
+advanced melodrama._) Ow! She 'as forsiken me! I'll go and blow me
+little 'ead off with a blunderbuss! Ow that one so fair could be so
+false!
+
+MASTER THOMAS RIGGETTS (_the page boy, whose passion for the lady who
+has just become Mrs. Garnet has for many months been a byword in the
+servants' hall_). Huh! (_To himself bitterly._) Tike care, tike care,
+lest some day you drive me too far.        [_Is left brooding darkly._
+
+
+UPSTAIRS
+
+THE BRIDE. ... Thank you.... Oh, thank you.... Thank you so much....
+Thank you _so_ much ... oh, thank you.... Thank you.... Thank you _so_
+much.
+
+THE BRIDEGROOM. Thanks.... Oh, thanks.... Thanks awf'lly.... Thanks
+awf'lly.... Thanks awf'lly.... Oh, thanks awf'lly ... (_with a
+brilliant burst of invention, amounting almost to genius_) Thanks
+_frightfully_.
+
+THE BRIDE (_to herself, rapturously_). A-a-a-h!
+
+THE BRIDEGROOM (_dabbing at his forehead with his handkerchief during
+a lull_). I shall drop.
+
+THE BEST MAN (_appearing suddenly at his side with a glass_). Bellows
+to mend, old horse, what? Keep going. You're doing fine. Bless you.
+Bless you.
+
+   [_Drifts away._
+
+ELDERLY STRANGER (_to bridegroom_). Sir, I have jigged your wife on my
+knee.
+
+THE BRIDEGROOM (_with absent politeness_). Ah! Lately?
+
+ELDERLY STRANGER. When she was a baby, sir.
+
+THE BRIDEGROOM (_from force of habit_). Oh, thanks. Thanks awf'lly.
+
+THE BRIDE (_to herself_). _Why_ can't one get married every
+day!... (_catching sight of a young gentleman whose bi-weekly conversation
+with her in the past was wont to consist of two remarks on the weather and
+one proposal of marriage_). _Oh_! Oh, what a _shame_ inviting poor
+little Freddy Fraddle! Aunt Kathleen _must_ have known! How could she be
+so cruel! Poor little fellow, he must be suffering dreadfully!
+
+POOR LITTLE FREDDY FRADDLE (_addressing his immortal soul as he
+catches sight of the bridegroom, with a set smile on his face, shaking
+hands with an obvious bore_). Poor devil, poor, poor devil! And to
+think that I--! Well, well! There but for the grace of God goes
+Frederick Fraddle.
+
+THE BRIDEGROOM (_to the_ OBVIOUS BORE). Thanks. Thanks awf'lly.
+
+THE OBVIOUS BORE (_in measured tones_).... are going, as you say, to
+Wales for your honeymoon, you should on no account miss the
+opportunity of seeing the picturesque ruins of Llanxwrg Castle, which
+are among the most prominent spectacles of Carnarvonshire, a county,
+which I understand you to say, you propose to include in your visit.
+The ruins are really part of the village of Twdyd-Prtsplgnd, but your
+best station would be Golgdn. There is a good train service to and
+from that spot. If you mention my name to the custodian of the ruins,
+he will allow you to inspect the grave of the celebrated ----
+
+IMMACULATE YOUTH (_interrupting_). Hello, Garnet, old man. Don't know
+if you remember me. Latimer, of Oriel. I was a fresher in your third
+year. Gratters!
+
+THE BRIDEGROOM (_with real sincerity for once_). Thanks. Thanks
+awf'lly.
+
+   [_They proceed to talk Oxford shop together, to the exclusion
+   of the O. B., who glides off in search of another victim_.
+
+
+IN THE STREET
+
+THE COACHMAN (_to his horse_). _Kim_ up, then!
+
+THE HORSE (_to itself_). Deuce of a time these people are. Why don't
+they hurry. I want to be off. I'm certain we shall miss that train.
+
+THE BEST MAN (_to crowd of perfect strangers, with whom in some
+mysterious way he has managed to strike up a warm friendship_). Now,
+then, you men, stand by. Wait till they come out, then blaze away.
+Good handful first shot. That's what you want.
+
+THE COOK (_in the area, to_ JANE). Oh, I do 'ope they won't miss that
+train, don't you? Oh, here they come. Oh, don't Miss Phyllis--Mrs.
+Garnet--look--well, there. And I can remember her a little slip of a
+girl only so high, and she used to come to my kitchen, and she used to
+say, "Mrs. Minchley," she used to say--it seems only yesterday--"Mrs.
+Minchley, I want--"
+
+   [_Left reminiscing._
+
+THE BRIDE (_as the page boy's gloomy eye catches hers, "smiles as she
+was wont to smile_").
+
+MASTER RIGGETTS (_with a happy recollection of his latest-read work of
+fiction--"Sir Rupert of the Hall": Meadowsweet Library--to himself_).
+"Good-by, proud lady. Fare you well. And may you never regret.
+May--you--nevorrr--regret!"
+
+   [_Dives passionately into larder, and consoles himself with jam._
+
+THE BEST MAN (_to his gang of bravoes_). Now, then, you men, bang it
+in.
+
+   [_They bang it in._
+
+THE BRIDEGROOM (_retrieving his hat_). Oh--    [_Recollects himself in
+time._
+
+THE BEST MAN. Oh, shot, sir! Shot, indeed!
+
+   [_The_ BRIDE _and_ BRIDEGROOM _enter the carriage amid a storm of
+     rice._
+
+THE BEST MAN (_coming to carriage window_). Garny, old horse.
+
+THE BRIDEGROOM. Well?
+
+THE BEST MAN. Just a moment. Look here, I've got a new idea. The best
+ever, 'pon my word it is. I'm going to start a duck farm and run it
+without water. What? You'll miss your train? Oh, no, you won't.
+There's plenty of time. My theory is, you see, that ducks get thin by
+taking exercise and swimming about and so on, don't you know, so that,
+if you kept them on land always, they'd get jolly fat in about half
+the time--and no trouble and expense. See? What? You bring the missus
+down there. I'll write you the address. Good-by. Bless you. Good-by,
+Mrs. Garnet.
+
+THE BRIDE AND BRIDEGROOM (_simultaneously, with a smile apiece_).
+Good-by.
+
+   [_They catch the train and live happily ever afterwards._]
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+
+
+
+
+
+End of Project Gutenberg's Love Among the Chickens, by P. G. Wodehouse
+
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