"Not a thing, thanks."
"Then I'll be getting along to the coffee-room and booking a table. I'm lunching with a nephew of Julia Ukridge's," he explained to the young man.
There I thought he was being too optimistic - or, it might be better to say pessimistic. I had a feeling that when I had conveyed to him the substance of the recent conversation, Ukridge might deem it the prudent course to absent himself from the feast. Ukridge had always been a good trencherman, particularly when a guest, but it spoils the most lavish meal if your host starts sprinkling you with boiling oil and cutting you into small pieces.
And I was right. As I waited in the street outside the club, he came bustling up.
"Hullo, old horse. Finished your interview?"
"Yes," I said. "And you've finished your lunch."
As he listened to the story I had to tell, his mobile features gradually lengthened. A lifetime of reeling beneath the slings and arrows of outrageous Fortune had left this man's fibres toughened, but not so toughened that he was able to bear the latest of them with nonchalance.
However, after we had walked some little distance, he seemed to rally.
"Ah, well," he said. "Oh, ever thus from childhood's hour I've seen my fondest hopes decay. I never loved a tree or flower but 'twas the first to fade away. I always remember those lines, Corky, having had to write them out five hundred times on the occasion at school when I brought a stink bomb into the form-room. The son-tutoring job would appear to be off,"
"If I read aright the message in Horace Wanklyn's eyes, yes."
"On the other hand, I've got this colossal sum of fifteen...no, it's a bit less than that now, isn't it? this colossal sum of…perhaps I'd better count it." He reached for his hip-pocket, and his jaw fell like a drooping lily. "Corky! My wallet's gone!"
"What!"
"I see it all. It was that blister I gave the sixpence to. You remember how he pawed me ?"
"I remember. You were touched."
"Touched," said Ukridge in a hollow voice, "is right."
A ragged individual came up. London seemed full of ragged individuals today. He took a brief look at the knees of my trousers, dismissed me as having ore-producing potentialities and transferred his attention to Ukridge.
'Pardon me addressing you, sir, but am I right in supposing that you are Captain the Honourable Anthony Wilberforce ?"
"No."
'You are not Captain the Honourable Anthony Wilberforce ?"
"No.”
"You look very like Captain the Honourable Anthony Wilberforce."
"I can't help that."
"I'm sorry you are not Captain the Honourable Anthony Wilberforce, because he is a very liberal, openhanded gentleman. If I had told Captain the Honourable Anthony Wilberforce that it is some considerable time since I tasted bread - "
"Come on, Corky!" said Ukridge.
The love feast was over. Deserving Poor Ordinaries were down in the cellar, with no takers.
10
Oofy, Freddie and the Beef Trust
CONVERSATIONS were in progress in the smoking room of the Drones with a view to making up a party to go and see the Wrestling Championship at the Albert Hall, and a Bean suggested that Oofy Prosser be invited to join the expedition. Oofy, he put it to the meeting, had more pimples than the man of taste liked to be seen about with and was perhaps the nearest approach to a piece of cheese which the human race had so far produced, but he possessed one outstanding merit which went far to counter-balance these defects - viz. a stupendous bank account, and it was quite conceivable that, if handled right, he might loosen up and stand supper after the performance.
The proposal was well received, and when Oofy entered a few moments later the Bean issued his invitation. To the general surprise, instead of seeming gratified by this demand for his society, the club millionaire recoiled with every evidence of loathing and horror. At the mention of the word "wrestling" a look of intense malevolence passed over his face.
"Wrestling?" he cried. "You ask me to spend good money on a wrestling match? You want me to pay out cash to witness the obscene gyrations of a couple of pot-bellied nitwits who fritter away their time wallowing on mats and behaving like lunatic osteopaths? Wrestlers, forsooth! The scum of the earth! I'd like to dig a hole in the ground and collect all the wrestlers in the world and dump them into it, having previously skinned them with a blunt knife and cooked them over a slow fire. Wrestlers, indeed. Bah! Pah! Faugh! Tchah!" said Oofy Prosser, and turned on his heel and left the room.
An Egg was the first to break the puzzled silence.
"Do you know what I think?' he said. "I don't believe Oofy likes wrestlers."
"Exactly the thought that occurred to me, reading between the lines," agreed the Bean.
"You are perfectly right," said a Crumpet. "Your intuition has not deceived you. I was about to warn you, when he came in. He was recently interested in a venture connected with wrestlers and lost quite a bit of money. And you know how Oofy feels about parting with money."
His hearers nodded. In matters of finance their club-mate's dogged adhesiveness was a byword. Not one of those present but in his time had endeavoured to dip into the Prosser millions, always without success.
"That's why he isn't speaking to Freddie Widgeon now. It was through him that he got mixed up in the thing. Owing to Freddie, Jas Waterbury entered Oofy's life. And once Jas Waterbury enters your life, Freddie tells me, you can kiss at least a portion of your holdings good-bye."
"I wonder if I have happened to mention this Jas Waterbury to you before. Did I tell you about the time when Freddie sang at that Amateur Night binge down in Bottleton East and was accompanied on the piano by a greasy bird whom he had picked up in the neighbourhood? I did? Well, that was Jas Waterbury. In a brawl in a pub later on in the evening, Freddie happened to save his life, and on the strength of this he has been rolling up to the club and touching his brave preserver ever since for sums ranging from sixpence to as much as half a crown.
"You would think that if Bloke A saves Bloke B's life, it ought to be the former who touches the latter and not vice versa, but the noblesse oblige of the Widgeons does not permit Freddie to see it that way. He recognizes Jas Waterbury's claim and continues to brass up."
The chain of events with which my narrative deals (proceeded the Crumpet) started to uncoil itself, or whatever chains do, about a month ago. It was on a breezy morning towards the middle of May that Freddie, emerging from the club, found Jas Waterbury lurking on the steps. A couple of bob changed hands, and Freddie was about to shift on, when the other froze on to his coat sleeve and detained him.
"Half a mo, cocky," said Jas Waterbury. "Do you want to make a packet?" And Freddie, who has been hoping to make a packet since he was sacked from his first kindergarten, replied that Jas Waterbury interested him strangely.
"That's the way to talk," said the greasy bird. "That's the spirit I like to see. Well, I can ease you in on the ground floor of the biggest thing since the Mint. Just slip me a couple of hundred quid for working expenses and we're off."
Freddie laughed a hollow, mirthless laugh. The only time he had ever had money like that in his possession was when his uncle, Lord Blicester, had given him his wallet to hold while he brushed his topper.
"A couple of hundred quid?" he said. "Gosh, Jas Waterbury, from the light-hearted way you speak of such sums one would think you thought I was Oofy Prosser."
“Oofy how much?"
“Prosser. The wealthiest bimbo in the Drones. Silk underwear, shoes by Lobb, never without a flower in the buttonhole, covered with pimples, each pimple produced by gallons of vintage champagne, and always with an unsightly bulge in his breast pocket, where he keeps his roll. Ask him for your couple of hundred quids, my misguided old chunk of grease, not a poor deadbeat who is pretty shortly going to find a difficulty in getting three square a day, unless the ravens do their stuff.
And he was starting to biff off, with another sardonic laugh at the ide
a of anyone mistaking him for a plutocrat, when Jas Waterbury uttered these momentous words.
“Well, why don’t you slip me an intro to this gentleman friend of yours? Then, if you puts up the splosh, you get a commish.”
Freddie stared at him with bulging eyes. If you had told him half an hour before that the moment would come when he would look upon Jas Waterbury as beautiful, he would have scorned the idea. But his was what was happening now?
“A commish?” he whispered. “Golly, now you’re talking. We’ll go round and see him now. What’s the time? Half past eleven? We ought to catch him at breakfast.”
Their mission proved a complete success. I was at the bat the next morning, having one for the tonsils, when Oofy blew in, and from the fact that the eyes were aglow and his pimples gleaming, I deduced that he had spotted a chance of making money. In repose, as you know, Oofy’s eyes are like those of a dead fish, but if he thinks he sees a way of adding to his disgustingly large bank balance, they glitter with a strange light.
“I say,” he said, “do you know anything about wrestling? Professional wrestling, I mean. The all-in stuff. Good box-office value, isn’t it?”
I said that I had always understood so, especially up North.
“So this chap Waterbury says. Yesterday,” explained Oofy, :Freddy Widgeon brought a fellow to see me, and he placed a proposition before me which looks dashed good. It seems that he knows a couple of all-in wrestlers, and he wants me to advance two hundred quid for working capital, the scheme being that we hire a hall in one of these Northern manufacturing towns and put these birds on and clean up. He says we can safely bill the thing as a European championship, because nobody up there is going to know if a wrestler is a champion or not. Then we have a return match, and after that the rubber match, and then we start all over again somewhere else. There ought to be a pot of money in it.”
My heart was heavy at the thought of Oofy making more money, but I had to agree. Such a series of contests, I felt, could scarcely fail to bring home the bacon. Blood in these Northern manufacturing towns is always very rich and sporting, and it was practically a certainty that the inhabitants would amble up in their thousands.
"I'm going down to a pub at Barnes this afternoon to have a look at the fellows. From what Waterbury tells me, there seems no doubt that they are the goods. I shall probably make a fortune. There is the purse, of course, and Waterbury's cut, and I'm paying Freddie a ten per cent commission, but even so the profits ought to be enormous."
He licked his lips, and feeling that this might possibly be my moment, I asked him if he could lend me a fiver till Wednesday. He said No, he ruddy well could not, and the episode closed.
At two o'clock that afternoon, Oofy bowled down in his princely sports model two-seater to the White Stag, Barnes, and at twenty to three, Jas Waterbury, looking greasier than ever, was introducing him to the two catch-as-catch-canners.
It was a breath-taking experience. His first emotion, he tells me, was one of surprise that so much human tonnage could have been assembled in one spot. A cannibal king, beholding them, would have whooped with joy and reached for his knife and fork with the feeling that for once the catering department had not failed him; and if you could have boiled them down for tallow, you would have had enough ha'penny dips to light the homes of all the residents of Barnes for about a year and a quarter.
Reading from left to right, the pair consisted of an obese bounder who looked like a gorilla which has been doing itself too well on the bananas and a second obese bounder who would have made a hippopotamus seem streamlined. They had small, glittering eyes, no foreheads and more hair all over than you would have believed possible.
Jas Waterbury did the honours.
"Mr. Porky Jupp and Mr. Plug Bosher."
The Messrs. Jupp and Bosher said they were pleased to meet Oofy, but Oofy wasn't so sure he could look at the thing from the same kindly angle. The thought crossed his mind that if, when walking down a lonely alley on a moonless night, he had had to meet two of his fellow men, these were the two he would have picked last. Their whole personalities gave him the impression that neither was safe off the chain.
This conviction grew as he watched the exhibition bout which they put on for his benefit. It was like witnessing a turn-up between two pluguglies of the Stone Age. They snorted and gurgled and groaned and grunted and rolled on each other and jumped on each other and clutched each other's throats and bashed each other's faces and did the most extraordinary things to each other's stomachs. The mystery to Oofy was that they didn't come unstuck.
When the orgy scene was over, he was pale beneath his pimples and panting like a stag at bay, but convinced beyond the possibility of doubt that this was the stuff to give the rugged dwellers up North. As soon as he could get his breath back, he informed Jas Waterbury that he would write out a cheque immediately: and this having been done, they parted; Jas Waterbury and the almost humans leaving for a cottage in the country, where the latter could conduct their training out of reach of the temptations of the great city, and Oofy tooling home in the two-seater with the comfortable feeling that in the not distant future his current account would be swelling up as if it had got dropsy.
It had been Oofy's original intention, partly in order to keep a fatherly eye on his investment and partly because he wanted to watch the mass murderers pirouetting on each other's stomachs again, to look in at the training camp pretty shortly. But what with one thing and another, he didn't seem able to get around to it, and a couple of weeks passed with him still infesting the metrop.
However, he presumed Jas Waterbury was carrying on all right. He pictured Jas sweating away in and around the cottage, not sparing himself, a permanent blot on the rural scene. It surprised him, accordingly, when one morning Freddie Widgeon came into the Club and told him that the blighter was waiting in the hall.
"Looking dashed solemn and sinister," said Freddie. 'His manner, as he touched me for two bob, was strange and absent, I say, you don't think anything's gone wrong with the works, do you?"
This was precisely what Oofy was thinking. The presence of this greasy bird in Dover Street, W., when he should have been slithering about in the depths of the country, put him into a twitter. He legged it to the hall, followed by Freddie, and found Jas Waterbury chewing a dead cigar and giving the club appointments an approving once over.
"Nice little place you've got here. Pip, pip," said Jas Waterbury.
Oofy was in no mood for chit-chat.
"Never mind about my nice little place. What about your nice little place? Why aren't you at the cottage with the thugs?"
"Exactly," said Freddie. "Your place is at their side."
"Well, the fact is, cockies," said Jas Waterbury, "an awkward situation has arisen, and I thought we ought to have a conference. They've gone and had a quarrel. There's been a rift within the lute, if you understand the expression, and it looks as if it was spreading."
Oofy could make nothing of this. Nor could Freddie. Oofy asked what the dickens that mattered, and Freddie asked what the dickens that mattered, too.
"I'll tell you what it matters, cockies," said Jas Waterbury, putting his cigar gravely behind his ear and looking like a chunk of margarine with a secret sorrow. "Unless we can heal the rift, ruin stares us in the eyeball." And in a few crisp words he explained the inwardness of the situation.
Professional wrestling, it seems, is a highly delicate and scientific business which you can't just bung into a haphazard spirit, relying for your effects on the inspiration of the moment. Aggravated acts of mayhem like those perpetrated by Porky Jupp and Plug Bosher come to flower only after constant rehearsal, each move, down to the merest gnashing of the teeth, being carefully thought out in the quiet seclusion of the study and polished to the last button with unremitting patience. Otherwise the thing doesn't look right, and audiences complain.
Obviously, then, what you require first and foremost in a couple of wrestlers whom you are readying for the ar
ena, is a mutual sympathy and a cordial willingness to collaborate. And until recently such a sympathy had existed between Porky Jupp and Plug Bosher in abundant measure, each helping each and working unselfishly together for the good of the show.
To give them an instance of what he meant, said Jas
Waterbury, Porky would come along one day, after musing apart for a while, and suggest that Plug should sock him on the nose, because it would be a swell effect and he never felt anything when socked on the nose except a rather agreeable tickling sensation. Upon which, Plug, not to be outdone in the courtesies, would place his stomach unreservedly at the other's disposal, inviting him to jump up and down on it to his heart's content; he having so much stomach that he scarcely noticed it if people did buck-and-wings on the outskirts.
"Just a couple of real good pals," said Jas Waterbury, "like what's-his-name and who-was-it in the Bible. It was beautiful to see their team work. But now they've come over all nasty, and what's to be what I might call the upshot is more than I can tell you. If there hadn't been this rift within the lute, we'd have had a fine, stirring performance full of entertainment value and one long thrill from start to finish, but if they're going to be cross with each other, it won't look like anything. It'll all be over in a couple of minutes, because Plug can always clean up Porky with one hand if he wants to. And then what? People throwing pop bottles and yelling 'Fake!' "
"Well, that won't matter," said Oofy, pointing out the bright side. "They'll already have paid for their seats."
"And what about the return match? And the rubber match? If the first show's a flop, it'll get around and we'll be playing to empty benches."
They saw what he was driving at now, and Freddie, all of a doodah at the prospect of losing his commish, uttered a low cry and sucked feverishly at the knob of his umbrella. As for Oofy, a look of anguish passed over his face, leaping from pimple to pimple like the chamois of the Alps from crag to crag and he asked how far the breach had widened. Were relations between these two garrotters really so very strained?"