Ukridge

EUCRIDGE'S DOG COLLEGE "'Laddy,' said Stanley Featherstone Hall Eucridge, that much enduring man, helping himself to my tobacco and slipping the pouch absently into his pocket, "'listen to me, you son of Beliore!' "'What?' I said, retrieving the pouch. "'Do you want to make an enormous fortune?' "'I do.' "'Then write my biography. Bung it down on paper, and we'll split the proceeds. "'I've been making a pretty close study of your stuff lately, old horse, and it's all wrong. "'The trouble with you is that you don't plumb the well-springs of human nature and all that. "'You just think up some rotten yarn about some damn thing or another, and shove it down. "'Now, if you tackled my life, you'd have something worth writing about. "'Pots of money in it, my boy. "'English serial rights, and American serial rights, and book rights, and dramatic rights, and movie rights. "'Well, you can take it from me that, at a conservative estimate, we should clean up at least £50,000 apiece. "'As much as that. Fully that. "'And listen, laddie, I'll tell you what. "'You're a good chap, and we've been pals for years, so I'll let you have my share of the English serial rights for £100 down. "'What makes you think I've got £100? "'Well, then, I'll make it my share of the English and American serial rights for 50. "'Your collar's come off its stud. "'How about my complete share of the whole dashed outfit for 25? "'Not for me, thanks. "'Then I'll tell you what, old horse,' said Ukridge, inspired, "'just lend me half a crown to be going on with.' "'If the leading incidents of S.F. Ukridge's disreputable career are to be given to the public, and not, as some might suggest, decently hushed up, I suppose I am the man to write them. "'Ukridge and I have been intimates since the days of school. "'Together we sported on the green, and when he was expelled, no one missed him more than I. "'An unfortunate business, this expulsion. "'Ukridge's generous spirit, ever ill-attuned to school rules, caused him eventually to break the solemnness of them all by sneaking out at night to try his skill at the coconut shires of the local village fair, and his foresight in putting on scarlet whiskers and a false nose for the expedition was completely neutralised by the fact that he absent-mindedly wore his school-cap throughout the entire proceedings. He left the next morning regretted by all. "'After this there was a hiatus of some years in our friendship. "'I was at Cambridge, absorbing culture, and Ukridge, as far as I could gather from his rare letters and the reports of mutual acquaintances, flitting about the world like a snipe. "'Somebody met him in New York, just off a cattle-ship. "'Somebody else saw him in Buenos Aires. "'Somebody again spoke sadly of having been pounced on by him at Monte Carlo and touched for a fiver. "'It was not until I settled down in London that he came back into my life. "'We met in Piccadilly one day, and resumed our relations where they'd been broken off. "'Old associations are strong, and the fact that he was about my build and so could wear my socks and shirts drew us very close together. "'Then he disappeared again, and it was a month or more before I got news of him.