Chapter 5.
Buckling to

   Sunshine, streaming into my bedroom through the open window, woke me 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 with brisk scuffling. On the gravel in front of the house lay the mongrel, Bob, blinking lazily.
   The gleam of the sea through the trees turned my thoughts to bathing. I dressed quickly and went out. Bob rose to meet me, waving an absurdly long tail. The hatchet was definitely buried now. That little matter of the jug of water was forgotten.
   A walk of five minutes down the hill brought me, accompanied by Bob, to the sleepy little town. I passed through the narrow street, and turned on to the beach, walking in the direction of the combination of pier and break-water which loomed up through the faint mist.
   The tide was high, and, leaving my clothes to the care of Bob, who treated them as a handy bed, I dived into twelve feet of clear, cold water. As I swam, I compared it with the morning tub of London, and felt that I had done well to come with Ukridge to this pleasant spot. Not that I could rely on unbroken calm during the whole of my visit. I knew nothing of chicken-farming, but I 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, I laughed, and swallowed a generous mouthful of salt water; and, turning, swam back to Bob and my clothes.
   On my return, I found Ukridge, in his shirt sleeves and minus a collar, assailing a large ham. Mrs. Ukridge, looking younger and more child-like than ever in brown holland, smiled at me over the tea-pot.
   “Hullo, old horse,” bellowed Ukridge, “where have you been? 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.”
   To support her statement there floated in through the window a cackling which for volume and variety beat anything I 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 Ukridge’s farm.
   “There seems to have been no stint,” I said.
   “Quite a goodish few, 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 sorts have you got mostly?” I asked, showing a professional interest.
   “Oh, all sorts. My theory, laddie, is this. It doesn’t matter a bit what kind we get, because they’ll all lay; and if we sell settings of eggs, which we will, we’ll merely say it’s an unfortunate accident if they turn out mixed when hatched. Bless you, people don’t mind what breed a fowl is, so long as it’s got two legs and a beak. These dealer chaps were so infernally particular. ‘Any Dorkings?’ they said. ‘All right,’ I said, ‘bring on your Dorkings.’ ‘Or perhaps you will require a few Minorcas?’ ‘Very well,’ I said, ‘unleash the Minorcas.’ They were going on—they’d have gone on for hours—but I stopped ‘em. ‘Look here, my dear old college chum,’ I said kindly but firmly to the manager johnny—decent old buck, with the manners of a marquess,—‘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. Mix ‘em up, laddie,’ I said, ‘mix ‘em up.’ And he has, by jove. You go into the yard and look at ‘em. Beale has turned them out of their crates. 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 feel like it, and pick up worms, or whatever they feed on. We must rig them up some sort of 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 hen-coops. 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, of course.”
   “Cheaper to make them. Suppose we get a lot of boxes. Sugar boxes are as good as any. It won’t take long to knock up a few coops.”
   Ukridge thumped the table with enthusiasm, upsetting his cup.
   “Garny, old horse, you’re a marvel. You think of everything. We’ll buckle to right away, and get the whole pace fixed up the same as mother makes it. What an infernal noise those birds are making. I suppose they don’t feel at home in the yard. Wait till they see the A1 compact 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 with much interest, was roused from his reflections and despatched to the town for the wire and sugar boxes. Ukridge, taking his place at the gate, gazed at the fowls with the affectionate air of a proprietor.
   “Well, they have certainly taken you at your word,” I said, “as far as variety is concerned.”
   The man with the manners of a marquess seemed to have been at great pains to send a really representative selection of fowls. There were blue ones, black ones, white, grey, yellow, brown, big, little, Dorkings, Minorcas, Cochin Chinas, Bantams, Wyandottes. It was an imposing spectacle.
   The Hired Man returned towards 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 I, 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 my 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,” he said, beaming through misty pince-nez over a long glass. “That is the stuff to administer to ‘em! At this rate we shall have the place in corking condition before bedtime. Quiet efficiency—that’s the wheeze! What do you think of those for coops, Beale?”
   The Hired Man examined them woodenly.
   “I’ve seen worse, sir.”
   He continued his examination.
   “But not many,” he added. Beale’s passion for the truth had made him unpopular in three regiments.
   “They aren’t so bad,” I said, “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 labour 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 I wrote that night to my friend Lickford.
   “ … Have you ever played a game called Pigs in Clover? We have just finished a merry 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 on the beach. Wants some exercise, I suppose. Personally, I feel as if I should never move again. 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 in the cube sugar-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 shan’t 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 Stanley Featherstonehaugh! He likes his manoeuvres to be on a large, dashing, Napoleonic scale. He said, ‘Open the yard gate and let the blighters come out into the open; then sail in and drive them in mass formation 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 theatre. Then we closed in on them to bring off the big drive. For about thirty 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 in that direction, with Bob after it, barking his hardest. The fowl was showing a rare turn of speed and gaining rapidly. Presently Bob came back, panting, having evidently given the thing up. We, in the meantime, were chasing the rest of the birds all over the garden. The affair 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 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 sugar-box coops in a row, and when we caught a fowl we put it in 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 still 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. It is only the beginning. I look with confidence for further interesting events. I believe if Ukridge kept white mice he would manage to get feverish excitement out of it. He is at present lying on the sofa, smoking one of his infernal brand of cigars, drinking whisky and soda, and complaining with some bitterness because the whisky isn’t as good as some he once tasted in Belfast. From the basement I can hear faintly the murmur of innumerable fowls.”

Chapter 6.
Mr. Garnet’s Narrative—Has to Do with a Reunion

   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?” but they were coops within the meaning of the Act, and we induced 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, Ukridge holding himself proudly aloof. While Beale and I worked ourselves to a fever in the sun, the senior partner of the firm sat on a deck-chair in the shade, offering not unkindly criticism and advice and from time to time abusing his creditors, who were numerous. For we had hardly been in residence a day before he began to order in a vast supply of necessary and unnecessary things, all on credit. Some he got from the village, others from neighbouring towns. Axminster he laid heavily under contribution. He even went as far afield as Dorchester. He had a persuasive way with him, and the tradesmen seemed to treat him like a favourite son. The things began to pour in from all sides,—groceries, whisky, a piano, a gramophone, pictures. Also cigars in great profusion. He was not one of those men who want but little here below.
   As regards the financial side of these transactions, his method was simple and masterly. If a tradesman suggested that a small cheque on account would not be taken amiss, as one or two sordid fellows did, he became pathetic.
   “Confound it, sir,” he would say with tears in his voice, laying a hand on the man’s shoulders in a wounded way, “it’s a trifle hard, when a gentleman comes to settle in your neighbourhood, that you should dun him for money before he has got the preliminary expenses about the house off his back.” 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. Why, damme, in all my experience I’ve never heard anything like it!” Upon which the man would apologise, and go away, forgiven, with a large order for more goods.
   By these statesmanlike methods he had certainly made the place very comfortable. I suppose we all realised that the things would have to be paid for some day, but the thought did not worry us.
   “Pay?” bellowed Ukridge on the only occasion when I ventured to bring up the unpleasant topic, “of course we shall pay. Why not? I don’t like to see this faint-hearted spirit in you, old horse. The money isn’t coming in yet, I admit, but we must give it time. Soon we shall be turning over hundreds a week, hundreds! I’m in touch with all the big places,—Whiteley’s, Harrod’s, all the nibs. Here I am, I said to them, with a large chicken farm with all the modern improvements. You want eggs, old horses, 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, I’ll admit their terms did not come up to my expectations altogether, but we must not sneer at small prices at first.
   “When we get a connection, we shall be able to name our terms. It stands to reason, laddie. Have you ever seen a man, woman, or child who wasn’t eating an egg or just going to eat an egg or just coming away from eating an egg? I tell you, the good old egg is the foundation of daily life. Stop the first man you meet in the street and ask him which he’d sooner lose, his egg or his wife, and see what he says! We’re on to a good thing, Garny, my boy. Pass the whisky!”
   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 power of his hens which would have flattered them if they could have known it. It might also have stimulated their efforts in that direction, which up to date were feeble.
   It was now, as I have said, Thursday, the twenty-second of July,—a glorious, sunny morning, of the kind which Providence sends occasionally, simply in order to allow the honest smoker to take his after-breakfast pipe under ideal conditions. These are the pipes to which a man looks back in after years with a feeling of wistful reverence, pipes smoked in perfect tranquillity, mind and body alike at rest. It is over pipes like these that we dream our dreams, and fashion our masterpieces.
   My pipe was behaving like the ideal pipe; and, as I strolled spaciously about the lawn, my novel was growing nobly. I had neglected my literary work for the past week, owing to the insistent claims of the fowls. I am not one of those men whose minds work in placid independence of the conditions of life. But I was making up for lost time now. With each blue cloud that left my lips and hung in the still air above me, striking scenes and freshets of sparkling dialogue rushed through my brain. Another uninterrupted half hour, and I have no doubt that I should have completed the framework of a novel which would have placed me in that select band of authors who have no christian names. Another half hour, and posterity would have known me as “Garnet.”
   But it was not to be.
   “Stop her! Catch her, Garny, old horse!”
   I had wandered into the paddock at the moment. I looked up. Coming towards me at her best pace was a small hen. I recognised her immediately. It was the disagreeable, sardonic-looking bird which Ukridge, on the strength of an alleged similarity of profile to his wife’s nearest relative, had christened Aunt Elizabeth. A Bolshevist hen, always at the bottom of any disturbance in the fowl-run, a bird which ate its head off daily at our expense and bit the hands which fed it by resolutely declining to lay a single egg. Behind this fowl ran Bob, doing, as usual, the thing that he ought not to have done. Bob’s wrong-headedness in the matter of our hens was a constant source of inconvenience. From the first, he had seemed to regard the laying– in of our stock purely in the nature of a tribute to his sporting tastes. He had a fixed idea that he was a hunting dog and that, recognising this, we had very decently provided him with the material for the chase.
   Behind Bob came Ukridge. But a glance was enough to tell me that he was a negligible factor in the pursuit. He was not built for speed. Already the pace had proved too much for him, and he had appointed me his deputy, with full powers to act.
   “After her, Garny, old horse! Valuable bird! Mustn’t 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 we passed out of the paddock in the following order. First, Aunt Elizabeth, as fresh as paint, going well. Next, Bob, panting and obviously doubtful of his powers of staying the distance. Lastly, myself, determined, but wishing I were five years younger.
   After the first field Bob, like the dilettante and unstable dog he was, gave it up, and sauntered off to scratch at a rabbit-hole with an insufferable air of suggesting that that was what he had come out for all the time. I continued to pound along doggedly. I was grimly resolute. I had caught Aunt Elizabeth’s eye as she passed me, and the contempt in it had cut me to the quick. This bird despised me. I am not a violent or a quick-tempered man, but I have my self-respect. I will not be sneered at by hens. All the abstract desire for Fame which had filled my mind five minutes before was concentrated now on the task of capturing this supercilious bird.
   We had been travelling down hill all this time, but at this point we crossed a 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 Aunt Elizabeth, too, was beginning to feel the effects of her run, or whether she did it out of the pure effrontery of her warped and unpleasant nature, I do not know; but she now slowed down to walk, and even began to peck in a tentative manner at the grass. Her behaviour infuriated me. I felt that I was being treated as a cipher. I vowed that this bird should realise yet, even if, as seemed probable, I burst in the process, that it was no light matter to be pursued by J. Garnet, author of “The Manoeuvres of Arthur,” etc., a man of whose work so capable a judge as the Peebles /Advertiser/ had said “Shows promise.”
   A judicious increase of pace brought me within a yard or two of my quarry. But Aunt Elizabeth, apparently distrait, had the situation well in hand. She darted from me with an amused chuckle, and moved off rapidly again up the hill.
   I followed, but there was that within me that told me I had shot my bolt. The sun blazed down, concentrating its rays on my back to the exclusion of the surrounding scenery. It seemed to follow me about like a limelight.
   We had reached level ground. Aunt Elizabeth had again slowed to a walk, and I was capable of no better pace. Very gradually I closed in. There was a high boxwood hedge in front of us; and, just as I came close enough once more to stake my all on a single grab, Aunt Elizabeth, with another of her sardonic chuckles, dived in head– foremost and struggled through in the mysterious way in which birds do get through hedges. The sound of her faint spinster-like snigger came to me as I stood panting, and roused me like a bugle. The next moment I too had plunged into the hedge.
   I was in the middle of it, 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 the gravel path of a private garden. Beyond the path was a croquet lawn, and on this lawn I perceived, as through a glass darkly, three figures. The mist cleared from my eyes, and I recognised two of them.
   One was the middle-aged Irishman who had travelled down with us in the train. The other was his blue-eyed daughter.
   The third member of the party was a man, a stranger to me. By some miracle of adroitness he had captured Aunt Elizabeth, and was holding her in spite of her protests in a workmanlike manner behind the wings.

Chapter 7.
The Entente Cordiale Is Sealed

   There are moments and moments. The present one belonged to the more painful variety.
   Even to my exhausted mind it was plain that there was a need here for explanations. An Irishman’s croquet-lawn is his castle, and strangers cannot plunge in through hedges without inviting comment.
   Unfortunately, speech was beyond me. I could have emptied a water– butt, laid 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 restraining hand Aunt Elizabeth now lay, outwardly resigned but inwardly, as I, who knew her haughty spirit, could guess, boiling with baffled resentment. I could see her looking out of the corner of her eye, trying to estimate the chances of getting in one good hard peck with her aquiline beak.
   “Come right in,” said the man pleasantly. “Don’t knock.”
   I stood there, gasping. I was only too well aware that I presented a quaint appearance. I had removed my hat before entering the hedge, and my hair was full of twigs and other foreign substances. My face was moist and grimy. My mouth hung open. My legs felt as if they had ceased to belong to me.
   “I must apol– …” I began, and ended the sentence with gulps.
   The elderly gentleman looked at me with what seemed to be indignant surprise. His daughter appeared to my guilty conscience to be looking through me. Aunt Elizabeth sneered. The only friendly face was the man’s. He regarded me with a kindly smile, as if I were some old friend who had dropped in unexpectedly.
   “Take a long breath,” he advised.
   I took several, and felt better.
   “I must apologise for this intrusion,” I said successfully. “Unwarrantable” would have rounded off the sentence neatly, but I would not risk it. It would have been mere bravado to attempt unnecessary words of five syllables. I took in more breath. “The fact is, I did—didn’t know there was a private garden beyond the hedge. If you will give me my hen …”
   I stopped. Aunt Elizabeth was looking away, as if endeavouring to create an impression of having nothing to do with me. I am told by one who knows that hens cannot raise their eyebrows, not having any; but I am prepared to swear that at this moment Aunt Elizabeth raised hers. I will go further. She sniffed.
   “Here you are,” said the man. “Though it’s hard to say good-bye.”
   He held out the hen to me, and at this point a hitch occurred. He did his part, the letting go, all right. It was in my department, the taking hold, that the thing was bungled. Aunt Elizabeth slipped from my grasp like an eel, stood for a moment eyeing me satirically with her head on one side, then fled and entrenched herself in some bushes at the 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 is a dignified retreat. But there is one thing essential to a dignified retreat. You must know the way out. It was the lack of that knowledge that kept me standing there, looking more foolish than anyone has ever looked since the world began. I could not retire by way of the hedge. If I could have leaped the hedge with a single debonair bound, that would have been satisfactory. But the hedge was high, and I did not feel capable at the moment of achieving a debonair bound 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 organised army. The common object, the pursuit of the elusive Aunt Elizabeth, made us friends. In the first minute of the proceedings the Irishman was addressing me as “me dear boy,” and the man, who had introduced himself as Mr. Chase—a lieutenant, I learned later, 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 more than sinister. I did not like the idea of dashing young lieutenants in the senior service calling a girl Phyllis whose eyes had haunted me since I had first seen them.
   Nevertheless, I crawled into the bushes and administered to Aunt Elizabeth a prod in the lower ribs—if hens have lower ribs. The more I study hens, the more things they seem able to get along without—which abruptly disturbed her calm detachment. She shot out 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 neat piece of work!”
   I thanked him. He deprecated my thanks. He had, he said, only done his duty, as expected to by England. He then introduced me to the elderly Irishman, who was, it seemed, a professor at Dublin University, by name, Derrick. Whatever it was that he professed, it was something that did not keep him for a great deal of his time at the University. He informed me that he always spent his summers at Combe Regis.
   “I was surprised to see you at Combe 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, “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 seem to have collected a good deal of the scenery coming through that hedge.”
   “I was wondering—” I said. “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 lunch. You’ll stay to lunch, Mr. Garnet?”
   I thanked him, commented on possible inconvenience to his arrangements, was overruled, and went off with my friend the lieutenant to the house. We imprisoned Aunt Elizabeth in the stables, to her profound indignation, gave directions for lunch to be served to her, 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 travelled down from London in the same carriage.”
   “He’s a dear old boy, if you rub him the right way. But—I’m telling you this for your good and guidance; a man wants a chart in a strange sea—he can cut up rough. And, when he does, he goes off like a four– point-seven and the population for miles round climbs trees. I think, if I were you, I shouldn’t mention Sir Edward Carson at lunch.”
   I promised that I would try to avoid the temptation.
   “In fact, you’d better keep off Ireland altogether. It’s the safest plan. Any other subject you like. 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. Shall we do down?”
   We got to know each other at lunch.
   “Do you hunt hens,” asked Tom Chase, who was mixing the salad—he was one of those men who seemed to do everything a shade better than anyone else—”for amusement or by your doctor’s orders? Many doctors, I believe, insist on it.”
   “Neither,” I said, “and especially not for amusement. The fact is, I’ve been lured down here by a friend of mine who has started a chicken farm—”
   I was interrupted. All three of them burst out laughing. Tom Chase 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? Why, you’re the man we’ve all been praying to meet for days past. You’re the talk of the town. If you can call Combe Regis a town. Everybody is discussing you. Your methods are new and original, aren’t they?”
   “Probably. Ukridge knows nothing about fowls. I know less. He considers it an advantage. He says our minds ought to be unbiassed.”
   “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 management of poultry? You do not?”
   I hastened to disclaim any such feat. I had never really approved of these infernal talks on the art of chicken-farming which Ukridge had dropped into the habit of delivering when anybody visited our farm. I admit that it was a pleasing spectacle to see my managing director in a pink shirt without a collar and very dirty flannel trousers lecturing the intelligent native; but I had a feeling that the thing tended to expose our ignorance to men who had probably had to do with fowls from their cradle up.
   “His lectures are very popular,” said Phyllis Derrick with a little splutter of mirth.
   “He enjoys them,” I said.
   “Look here, Garnet,” said Tom 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 yet, but I believe he intends to be one shortly, with the assistance of the fowls. But you mustn’t look on me as in any way responsible for the arrangements at the farm. I am merely a labourer. The brainwork of the business lies in Ukridge’s department. As a matter of fact, I came down here principally in search of golf.”
   “Golf?” said Professor Derrick, with the benevolent approval of the enthusiast towards a brother. “I’m glad you play golf. We must have a round together.”
   “As soon as ever my professional duties will permit,” I said gratefully.


* * *

   There was croquet after lunch,—a game of which I am a poor performer. Phyllis Derrick and I played the professor and Tom 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,” she said, 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?”
   “My name is Jeremy, Miss Derrick.”
   “Oh, you wrote it?” She turned a little pink. “Then you must have—oh, nothing.”
   “I couldn’t help it, I’m afraid.”
   “Did you know what I was going to say?”
   “I guessed. You were going to say that I must have heard your criticisms in the train. You were very lenient, I thought.”
   “I didn’t like your heroine.”
   “No. What is a ‘creature,’ Miss Derrick?”
   “Pamela in your book is a ‘creature,’ “ she replied unsatisfactorily.
   Shortly after this 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. The sun was setting as I left to return to the farm, with Aunt Elizabeth 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, seeming to come from another world, a sheep-bell tinkled, deepening the silence. Alone in a sky of the palest blue there gleamed a small, bright star.
   I addressed this star.
   “She was certainly very nice to me. Very nice indeed.” The star said nothing.
   “On the other hand, I take it that, having had a decent up-bringing, she would have been equally polite to any other man whom she had happened to meet at her father’s house. Moreover, I don’t feel altogether easy in my mind about that naval chap. I fear the worst.”
   The star winked.
   “He calls her Phyllis,” I said.
   “Charawk!” chuckled Aunt Elizabeth from her basket, in that beastly cynical, satirical way which has made her so disliked by all right– thinking people.

Chapter 8.
A Little Dinner at Ukridge’s

   “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 neighbours 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. “Oh, beast of a cat.”
   “Oh, 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. That’s why he didn’t come down with us.”
   “A great, horrid, /beast/ of a dog bit him, Mr. Garnet. 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 dinner, 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 boisterous. Isn’t he, Mr. Garnet?”
   “That’s all right,” said Ukridge. “Bob won’t hurt him, unless he tries to steal his dinner. In that case we will have Edwin made into a rug.”
   “Stanley doesn’t like Edwin,” said Mrs. Ukridge, sadly.
   Edwin arrived early in the afternoon, and was shut into the kitchen. He struck me as a handsome cat, but nervous.
   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 colour. 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 poker-like 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 he 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! My dear old man, 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 gruesome 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 his 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 this 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, a subject on which he held views of his own as ingenious as they were novel. The interruption annoyed him.
   “Well, Beale,” he said, “what is it?”
   “That there cat, sir, what came to-day.”
   “Oh, Beale,” cried Mrs. Ukridge in agitation, “/what/ has happened?”
   “Having something to say to the missis—”
   “What has happened? Oh, Beale, don’t say that Edwin has been hurt? Where is he? Oh, /poor/ Edwin!”
   “Having something to say to the missis—”
   “If Bob has bitten him I hope he had his nose /well/ scratched,” said Mrs. Ukridge vindictively.
   “Having something to say to the missis,” 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.”
   “‘Hullo, puss,’ I says to him, ‘and ‘ow are /you/, sir?’ ‘Be careful,’ says the missis. ‘ ‘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 understands each other. ‘Im and me,’ I says, ‘is old friends. ‘E’s my dear old pal, Corporal Banks.’ 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, what 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, “blowed if the old cat didn’t give one jump, and move in quick time up the chimney, where ‘e now remains, paying no ‘eed to the missis’ attempts to get him down again.”
   Sensation, as they say in the reports.
   “But he’ll be cooked,” cried Phyllis, open-eyed.
   “No, he won’t. Nor will our dinner. Mrs. Beale always lets the kitchen fire out during the afternoon. And how she’s going to light it with that—”
   There was a pause while one might count three. It was plain that the speaker was struggling with himself.
   “—that cat,” he concluded safely, “up the chimney? 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,” said Ukridge.
   “Oh, don’t hurt poor Edwin,” said Mrs. Ukridge.
   “I ‘ave tried that, sir, but I can’t reach him, and I’m 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,—remorse for having come at all, and a faint hope that it might not be too late to back out of it.
   “That will be splendid,” said Phyllis.
   “Er, I think, my dear sir,” said her father, “it would be hardly fair for 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 endorse 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.”
   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 humouring. A huge cheese faced us in almost a swashbuckling way. I do not know how else to describe it. It wore a blatant, rakish, /nemo-me-impune– lacessit/ air, 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. Finally, a black bottle of whisky stood grimly beside Ukridge’s plate. The professor looked the sort of man who drank claret of a special year, or nothing.
   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 pretence. The professor was very silent by the time we had finished. Ukridge had been terrible. The professor had forced himself to be genial. He had tried to talk. He had told stories. And when he began one—his stories would have been the better for a little more briskness and condensation—Ukridge almost invariably interrupted him, before he had got half way through, without a word of apology, and started on some anecdote of his own. He furthermore disagreed with nearly every opinion the professor 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 offence, that another man—or the same man at a better meal—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. I had been expecting it momentarily, but my heart seemed to stand still when it actually arrived.
   Ukridge probably knew less about the Irish question than any male adult in the kingdom, but he had boomed forth some very positive opinions of his own on the subject before I could get near enough to him to whisper a warning. When I did, I suppose I must have whispered louder than I had intended, for the professor heard me, and my words acted as the match to the powder.
   “He’s touchy about Ireland, is he?” he thundered. “Drop it, is it? And why? Why, sir? I’m one of the best tempered men that ever came from Dublin, let me tell you, and I will not stay here to be insulted by the insinuation that I cannot discuss Ireland as calmly as any one in this company or out of it. Touchy about Ireland, is it? Touchy—?”
   “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. Every word you say betrays your profound ignorance. 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, sir. Come, Phyllis, me dear. Mrs. Ukridge, good-night.”

Chapter 9.
Dies Irae

   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 read only a few days before our cold-dinner party a shop-woman, annoyed 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, said the writer, “‘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 an adequate degree of skill, the reader should have gathered by this time the state of my feelings.


I did not love as others do:
None ever did that I’ve heard tell of.
My passion was a by-word through
The town she was, of course, the belle of.


   At least it was—fortunately—not quite that; but it was certainly genuine and most disturbing, and it grew with the days. Somebody 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 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 interview had been brief and our conversation conventional; but it is the intervals between the meeting that do the real damage. Absence—I do not claim the thought as my own—makes the heart grow fonder. And now, thanks to Ukridge’s amazing idiocy, a barrier had been thrust between us. Lord knows, the business of fishing for a girl’s heart is sufficiently difficult and delicate without the addition of needless obstacles. To cut out the naval miscreant under equal conditions would have been a task ample enough for my modest needs. It was terrible to have to re-establish 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? Old Derrick isn’t the only person in the world. If he doesn’t want to know us, laddie, we just jolly well pull ourselves together and stagger along without him. It’s quite possible to be happy without knowing old Derrick. Millions of people are going about the world at this moment, singing like larks out of pure light-heartedness, who don’t even know of his existence. And, as a matter of fact, old horse, we haven’t time to waste making friends and being the social pets. Too much to do on the farm. Strict business is the watchword, my boy. We must be the keen, tense men of affairs, or, before we know where we are, we shall find ourselves right in the gumbo.
   “I’ve noticed, Garny, old horse, that you haven’t been the whale for work lately that you might be. You must buckle to, laddie. There must be no slackness. We are at a critical stage. On our work now depends the success of the speculation. Look at those damned cocks. They’re always fighting. Heave a stone at them, laddie, while you’re up. What’s the matter with you? You seem pipped. Can’t get the novel off your chest, or what? You take my tip and give your brain a rest. Nothing like manual labour 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 little 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.
   “My dear old son, he didn’t mind being called a fat little buffer. You keep harping on that. It’s no discredit to a man to be a fat little buffer. Some of the noblest men I have met have been fat little buffers. What was the matter with old Derrick was a touch of liver. I said to myself, when I saw him eating cheese, ‘that fellow’s going to have a nasty shooting pain sooner or later.’ I say, laddie, just heave another rock or two at those cocks, will you. They’ll slay each other.”
   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 following morning on the beach, he cut me in the most uncompromising manner.
   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 mass of soft brown hair. But to me she appeared almost commonplace in comparison.
   It is never pleasant to be cut dead, even when you have done something to deserve it. It is like treading 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.
   “Hullo, so you’re back,” I said.
   “You’ve discovered my secret,” he admitted; “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 what you warned me against. Touched on the Irish question.”
   “Home Rule?”
   “He mentioned it among other things.”
   “And the professor went off?”
   “Like a bomb.”
   “He would. So now you have parted brass rags. 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 Mr. Derrick to effect a reconciliation. I felt that I must play the game. To request one’s rival to give one assistance in the struggle, to the end that he may be the more readily cut out, can hardly be considered cricket.
   “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-bye.”
   “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 is the game of disappointed lovers. On the other hand, 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 demeanour 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 nursed Edwin (now moving in society once more, and in his right mind), I lit my pipe and walked out across the fields through the cool summer night till I came to the hedge that shut off the Derrick’s 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 to 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.

Chapter 10.
I Enlist the Services of a Minion

   It would be interesting to know to what extent the work of authors is influenced by their private affairs. If life is flowing smoothly, are the novels they write in that period of content coloured 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 Hugh Walpole? If Maxim Gorky were invited to lunch by Trotsky, to meet Lenin, would he sit down and dash off a trifle in the vein of Stephen Leacock? Probably the eminent have the power of detaching their writing self from their living, work-a-day self; but, for my own part, the frame of mind in which I now found myself had a disastrous effect on my novel that was to be. 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. A magnificent despondency became its keynote. It would not do. I felt that I must make a resolute effort to shake off my depression. More than ever the need of 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 harbour when the affairs of the farm did not require my attention.
   Things were not going well on our model chicken farm. Little accidents marred the harmony of life in the fowl-run. On one occasion a hen—not Aunt Elizabeth, I am sorry to say,—fell into a pot of tar, and came out an unspeakable object. Ukridge put his spare pair of tennis shoes in the incubator to dry them, and permanently spoiled the future of half-a-dozen eggs which happened to have got there first. Chickens kept straying into the wrong coops, where they got badly pecked by the residents. Edwin slew 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.
   “After all,” he said, “What’s one bird more or less? Yes, I know I made a fuss when that beast of a cat lunched off those two, but that was simply the principle of the thing. I’m not going to pay large sums for chickens purely in order that a cat which I’ve never liked can lunch well. Still, we’ve plenty left, and the eggs are coming in better now, though we’ve still 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 going 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. Come in and have a drink, laddie, and let’s talk it over.”
   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 trying to get my novel into shape. 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.
   “Garny, come here. I want you to see the most astounding thing.”
   “What’s the matter?” I asked.
   “Blast 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?”
   “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.”
   “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?”
   “I 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 all 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 been and got the roop.”
   I had never heard of the disease before, but it sounded bad.
   “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.
   “Well, my aunt, sir, when ‘er fowls ‘ad the roop, she gave them snuff.”
   “Give them snuff, she did,” he repeated, with relish, “every morning.”
   “Snuff!” said Mrs. Ukridge.
   “Yes, ma’am. She give ‘em 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.
   “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 the nearest farmer, 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 in the direction of the village of Up Lyme to consult Farmer Leigh on the matter. 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 a footbridge. 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 footbridge, and I drew back to let her pass.
   It being the privilege of woman to make the first sign of recognition, I said nothing. I merely lifted my hat in a non-committing 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. A pause.
   “I couldn’t tell you so before, but I am so sorry this has happened.”
   “Oh, thanks awfully,” I said, realising 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-bye.”
   “Good-bye.”
   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 we went Dorkings with pasts, and Cochin Chinas which he had cured of diseases generally fatal on, 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—and also a slight headache. A visit to the Cob would, I thought, do me good. I had missed my bathe 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, possibly a descendant of the gentleman of that name who went to Widdicombe Fair with Bill Brewer and old Uncle Tom Cobley and all on a certain memorable occasion, and assisted at the fatal accident to Tom Pearse’s grey mare.
   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 never looked 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 pipe drawing nicely as the result of certain explorations conducted that morning with a straw, my mind ranged idly over large subjects and small. I thought of love and chicken-farming. I mused on the immortality of the soul and the deplorable speed at which two ounces of tobacco disappeared. 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.


* * *

   It was precisely three minutes to twelve—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. Providence had failed to give satisfaction. I would, therefore, cease any connection with it, and start a rival business on my own account. After all, if you want a thing done well, you must do it yourself.
   In other words, since a 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.
   I had now to fight it out with Conscience. I quote the brief report which subsequently appeared in the /Recording Angel/:—


* * *


Three-Round Contest:
CONSCIENCE (Celestial B.C.) v. J. GARNET (Unattached).


Round One
   Conscience came to the scratch smiling and confident. Led off lightly with a statement that it would be bad for a man of the professor’s age to get wet. Garnet countered heavily, alluding to the warmth of the weather and the fact that the professor habitually enjoyed a bathe every day. Much sparring, Conscience not quite so confident, and apparently afraid to come to close quarters with this man. Time called, with little damage done.


Round Two
   Conscience, much freshened by the half minute’s rest, feinted with the charge of deceitfulness, and nearly got home heavily with “What would Phyllis say if she knew?” Garnet, however, side– stepped cleverly with “But she won’t know,” and followed up the advantage with a damaging, “Besides, it’s all for the best.” The round ended with a brisk rally on general principles, Garnet crowding in a lot of work. Conscience down twice, and only saved by the call of time.


Round Three (and last)
   Conscience came up very weak, and with Garnet as strong as ever it was plain that the round would be a brief one. This proved to be the case. Early in the second minute Garnet cross-countered with “All’s Fair in Love and War.” Conscience down and out. The winner left the ring without a mark.


* * *

   I rose, feeling much refreshed.
   That afternoon I interviewed Mr. Hawk in the bar-parlour of the Net and Mackerel.
   “Hawk,” I said to him darkly, over a mystic and conspirator-like pot of ale, “I want you, 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 pot of ale 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 encored his pot of ale.
   He kept on gurgling.
   I argued with the man.
   I spoke splendidly. I was eloquent, but at the same time concise. My choice of words was superb. I crystallised my ideas into pithy sentences which a child could have understood.
   And at the end of half-an-hour he had grasped 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 humour which was to be expected from a gentleman from London. I am afraid he must at one period in his career have lived at one of those watering-places at 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 he raised the price to a sovereign.
   A mercenary man. It is painful to see how rapidly the old simple spirit is dying out of our rural districts. Twenty years ago a fisherman would have been charmed to do a little job like that for a screw of tobacco.

Chapter 11.
The Brave Preserver

   I could have wished, during the next few days, that Mr. Harry Hawk’s attitude towards myself had not been so unctuously confidential and mysterious. It was unnecessary, in my opinion, for him to grin meaningly when 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 (ten shillings down and ten 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 demeanour 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 towards the beach. I was passing a dark doorway, when out shimmered Mr. Hawk as if he had been a spectre 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 it.”
   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 harbour 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. Only when going in to bat at cricket have I experienced a similar feeling of suspense. The boat lay almost motionless on the water. I had never seen the sea smoother. Little ripples plashed against the side of the Cob.
   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 headforemost 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 unskilfully. He appeared to be one of those men who can look after themselves in the water only when they are in bathing costume. In his shore clothes it would have taken him a week to struggle to land, if he had got there at all, which was unlikely.
   I know all about saving people from drowning. We used to practise 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 with much /eclat/ 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 source as needlessly realistic. As it was, I fancy he had swallowed of sea-water two or three hearty draughts.
   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 was against him. What the professor said of him, when he recovered his breath, I cannot repeat,—not because I do not remember it, but because there is a line, and one must draw it. Let it be sufficient to say that on the subject of Mr. Hawk he saw eye to eye with the citizen who had described him as a “girt fule.” 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. 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.”
   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.”
   “A little,” I agreed.
   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 grey 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’re 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, old horse?”
   “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.”
   “A great curse, drink,” said the professor. “Why, yes, Mr. Ukridge, I think I will. Thank you. Thank you. That will be enough. Not all the soda, if you please. Ah! this tastes pleasanter than salt water, Mr. Garnet. Eh? Eh? Ha—Ha!”
   He 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 wooden 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 M’Lurkin at St. Andrews.”
   “/The/ M’Lurkin?” 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 sympathise. Ukridge was all sympathy.
   “The man is an unprincipled scoundrel,” he said, “and should be torn limb from limb. Take my advice, and don’t go out with him again. Show him that you are not a man to be trifled with. The spilt 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 defence. 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 the professor would listen to no defence. My attempts at excusing him were ill received. Indeed, the professor shewed such 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, pouring himself out another whisky and soda. “My goodness, I should have liked to have seen him in the water. Why do I miss these good things?”

Chapter 12.
Some Emotions and Yellow Lupin

   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. The coffers are low, deuced 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. As for eggs, they are far too much for us.”
   For the last week monotony had been the keynote of our commissariat. We had 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 sign-boards 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 clamour 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 colour 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 Combe 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. The battle which took place on the first day after the election of the new members was a sight to remember. The results of it were still noticeable in the depressed aspect of certain of the recently enrolled.
   “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 of 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. The 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 a 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, sometimes Phyllis, or on long walks by myself. There was one particular walk along the cliffs, 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 and smoke by the hour. If ever I am stricken with smoker’s heart, or staggers, or tobacco amblyopia, or any other of the cheery things which doctors predict for the devotee of the weed, I shall feel that I sowed the seeds of it that summer in that little clearing overlooking the sea. A man in love needs much tobacco. A man thinking out a novel needs much tobacco. I was in the grip of both maladies. Somehow I found that my ideas flowed more readily in that spot than in any other.
   I had not been inside the professor’s grounds since the occasion when I had gone in through the box-wood 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. I felt that I should have put the question with such an exaggerated show of indifference that all would have been discovered.
   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.
   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 maid 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 to any extent for my anxiety to see him.
   “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—I felt the better for it.
   “He came down next day,” I said, “and made an excellent lunch of 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 steady 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 any old thing 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 Combe 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 downwards on the grass beside her. It was the same much-enduring copy of the “Manoeuvres 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 from the garden paths, she gave me her opinion of the book. In the main it was appreciative. I shall always associate the scent of yellow lupin with the higher criticism.
   “Of course, I don’t know anything about writing books,” she said.
   “Yes?” my tone implied, or I hope 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 just got ‘The Outsider—’ “ (My other novel. Bastable & Kirby, 6s. Satirical. All about Society—of which I know less than I know about chicken-farming. Slated by /Times/ and /Spectator/. Well received by /London Mail/ and /Winning Post/)—”and,” continued Phyllis, “Lady Maud is exactly the same as Pamela in the ‘Manoeuvres of Arthur.’ I thought you must have drawn both characters from some one you knew.”
   “No,” I said. “No. Purely imaginary.”
   “I am so glad,” said Phyllis.
   And then neither of us seemed to have anything to say. My knees began to tremble. I realised 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 lupin 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 bee hummed in the lupin.
   “Miss Derrick,” I said, and stopped again.
   “I say, you people,” said a cheerful voice, “tea is ready. Hullo, 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. The only word that could deal adequately with the situation slapped against my front teeth. I grinned a sickly grin.
   “Well, Tom,” said Phyllis.
   And there was, I thought, just the faintest tinkle of annoyance in her voice.


* * *

   “I’ve been bathing,” said Mr. Chase, /a propos des bottes/.
   “Oh,” I replied. “And I wish,” I added, “that you’d drowned yourself.”
   But I added it silently to myself.

Chapter 13.
Tea and Tennis

   “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.”
   “Tom, 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 Mr. 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 he knew?
   “The professor may be a member of an Anarchist League, or something, and this is his punishment for refusing to assassinate some sportsman.”
   “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 for 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, respecting the length of time between drinks. Just one more cup, please, Phyllis.”
   “But how does all that apply?” I asked, dry-mouthed.
   “Mr. 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 re-enacting 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 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,” she said.
   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 realise,” 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. 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 a present wasting her sweetness on the desert air of Yeovil. You had better sit down 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 Tilden Back-Handed Slosh. A winner every time.”
   We proceeded to the tennis court. I played with the sun in my eyes. I might, if I chose, emphasise 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 racquet, 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 friendly 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 six strokes. He served. Only once did I take the service with the full face of the racquet, and then I seemed to be stopping a bullet. I returned it into the net. The last of the series struck the wooden edge of my racquet, and soared over the back net into the shrubbery, after the manner of a snick to long slip off a fast bowler.
   “Game,” said Mr. Chase, “we’ll look for that afterwards.”
   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 instinctively 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. All 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 a couple of 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 loathe 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 underhand, I must send the ball over the net with the next stroke.
   I restrained myself this time, eschewing the careless vigour 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 racquet. 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 Tilden Slosh.”
   “I thought it must be,” said Phyllis.
   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. Phyllis had left the cedar now, and was picking flowers from the beds behind the court.
   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 Tilden Slosh diminished my lead by fifteen. 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 by 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 Slosh had beaten me on the post.
   “Game /and/—,” said Mr. Chase, tossing his racquet 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 of 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 very eyes of a lady-star. /It/ was never cut out ignominiously by infernally capable lieutenants in His Majesty’s Navy. No wonder it was cheerful.

Chapter 14.
A Council of War

   “The fact is,” said Ukridge, “if things go on as they are now, my lad, we shall be in the cart. This business wants bucking up. We don’t seem to be making headway. Why it is, I don’t know, but we are /not/ making headway. Of course, what we want is time. If only these scoundrels of tradesmen would leave us alone for a spell we could get things going properly. But we’re hampered and rattled and worried all the time. Aren’t we, Millie?”
   “Yes, dear.”
   “You don’t let me see the financial side of the thing enough,” I complained. “Why don’t you keep me thoroughly posted? 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, perhaps, but look at the business we’re doing. We sold a whole heap of eggs last week.”
   “But not enough, Garny old man. We aren’t making our presence felt. England isn’t ringing with our name. We sell a dozen eggs where we ought to be selling them by the hundred, carting them off in trucks for the London market and congesting the traffic. 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. Devilish unpleasant they’re making themselves. You see, laddie, there’s no denying it—we /did/ touch them for the deuce of a lot of things on account, and they agreed to take it out in eggs. All they’ve done so far is to take it out in apologetic letters from Millie. Now, I don’t suppose there’s a woman alive who can write a better apologetic letter than her nibs, but, if you’re broad-minded and can face facts, you can’t help seeing that the juiciest apologetic letter is not an egg. I meant to say, look at it from their point of view. Harrod—or Whiteley—comes into his store in the morning, rubbing his hands expectantly. ‘Well,’ he says, ‘how many eggs from Combe Regis to-day?’ And instead of leading him off to a corner piled up with bursting crates, they show him a four-page letter telling him it’ll all come right in the future. I’ve never run a store myself, but I should think that would jar a chap. Anyhow, the blighters seem to be getting tired of waiting.”
   “The last letter from Harrod’s was quite pathetic,” said Mrs. Ukridge sadly.
   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 rare specimens which Ukridge had actually managed to despatch to Brompton and Bayswater.
   Ukridge, having induced himself to be broad-minded for five minutes, now began to slip back to his own personal point of view and became once more the man with a grievance. His fleeting sympathy with the wrongs of Mr. Harrod and Mr. Whiteley disappeared.
   “What it all amounts to,” he said complainingly, “is that they’re infernally unreasonable. I’ve done everything possible to meet them. Nothing could have been more manly and straightforward than my attitude. I told them in my last letter but three that I proposed to let them have the eggs on the /Times/ instalment system, and they said I was frivolous. They said that to send thirteen eggs as payment for goods supplied to the value of 25 pounds 1s. 8 1/2 d. was mere trifling. Trifling, I’ll trouble you! That’s the spirit in which they meet my suggestions. It was Harrod who did that. I’ve never met Harrod personally, but I’d like to, just to ask him if that’s his idea of cementing amiable business relations. He knows just as well as anyone else that without credit commerce has no elasticity. It’s an elementary rule. I’ll bet he’d have been sick if chappies had refused to let him have tick when he was starting his store. Do you suppose Harrod, when he started in business, paid cash down on the nail for everything? Not a bit of it. He went about taking people by the coat– button and asking them to be good chaps and wait till Wednesday week. Trifling! Why, those thirteen eggs were absolutely all we had over after Mrs. Beale had taken what she wanted for the kitchen. As a matter of fact, if it’s anybody’s fault, it’s Mrs. Beale’s. That woman literally eats eggs.”
   “The habit is not confined to her,” I said.
   “Well, what I mean to say is, she seems to bathe in them.”
   “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 omelettes.”
   “She can’t make omelettes without breaking eggs,” I urged.
   “She can’t make them without breaking us, dammit,” said Ukridge. “One or two more omelettes, and we’re done for. No fortune on earth could stand it. We mustn’t have any more omelettes, Millie. We must economise. Millions of people get on all right without omelettes. I suppose there are families where, if you suddenly produced an omelette, the whole strength of the company would get up and cheer, led by father. Cancel the omelettes, old girl, from now onward.”
   “Yes, dear. But—”
   “Well?”
   “I don’t /think/ Mrs. Beale would like that very much, dear. She has been complaining a good deal about chicken at every meal. She says that the omelettes are the only things that give her a chance. She says there are always possibilities in an omelette.”
   “In short,” I said, “what you propose to do is deliberately to remove from this excellent lady’s life the one remaining element of poetry. You mustn’t do it. Give Mrs. Beale her omelettes, and let’s hope for a larger supply of eggs.”
   “Another thing,” said Ukridge. “It isn’t only that there’s a shortage of eggs. That wouldn’t matter so much if only we kept hatching out fresh squads of chickens. I’m not saying the hens aren’t doing their best. I take off my hat to the hens. As nice a hard-working lot as I ever want to meet, full of vigour and earnestness. It’s that damned incubator that’s letting us down all the time. The rotten thing won’t work. /I/ don’t know what’s the matter with it. The long and the short of it is that it simply declines to incubate.”
   “Perhaps it’s your dodge of letting down the temperature. You remember, you were telling me? I forget the details.”
   “My dear old boy,” he said earnestly, “there’s nothing wrong 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 deuced 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, old girl?”
   “Harrod’s, I think, dear,—yes, it was Harrod’s. It came down with the first lot of things.”
   “Then,” said Ukridge, banging the table with his fist, while his glasses flashed triumph, “we’ve got ‘em. The Lord has delivered Harrod’s into our hand. Write and answer that letter of theirs to– night, Millie. Sit on them.”
   “Yes, dear.”
   “Tell ‘em that we’d have sent them their confounded eggs long ago, if only their rotten, twopenny-ha’penny incubator had worked with any approach to decency.” He paused. “Or would you be sarcastic, Garny, old horse? No, better put it so that they’ll understand. Say that I consider that the manufacturer of the thing ought to be in Colney Hatch—if he isn’t there already—and that they are scoundrels for palming off a groggy machine of that sort on me.”
   “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 seemed to relieve Ukridge. His pessimism vanished. 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 improvements. 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 in 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, what of the local tradesmen?”
   Ukridge relapsed once more into gloom.
   “They are the worst of the lot. I don’t mind the London people 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?”
   “Oh, then those fellows I found you talking to yesterday were duns? I thought they were farmers, come to hear your views on the rearing of poultry.”
   “Which were they? Little chap with black whiskers and long, thin man with beard? That was Dawlish, the grocer, and Curtis, the fishmonger. The others had gone before you came.”
   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 farm. 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 meagre 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 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 the 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. But I was making quite enough with my pen to support myself, and, be it never 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 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 for 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 had 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 club-house I met the professor, whose demeanour was a welcome contrast to that of my late opponent. 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,” 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 Combe Regis this year. That’s 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 as badly as I play tennis. You’ll hardly believe me.”
   She smiled reminiscently.
   “Tom is much too good at tennis. His service is perfectly dreadful.”
   “It’s a little terrifying on first acquaintance.”
   “But you’re better at golf than at tennis, Mr. Garnet. I wish you were not.”
   “This is special pleading,” I said. “It isn’t fair to appeal to my better feelings, Miss Derrick.”
   “I didn’t know golfers had any where golf was concerned. 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.”
   “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.