"You seem to have taken on the job of acting as a sort of unofficial keeper to the man," said George. "You'll have to help him now."
"Well, I'll go and see him."
"The whole thing is too absurd," said George Tupper. "How can Ukridge get married to anyone! He hasn't a bob in the world."
"I'll point that out to him. He's probably overlooked it."
(from "No Wedding Bells for Him," by Sir Pelham Wodehouse)
"Do you know what has happened? That poor ass had gone and got himself engaged to be married to a girl at Clapham!'
"What?"
"Engaged! Girl at Clapham. Clapham Common," added George Tupper, as if in his opinion that made the matter even worse.
"You're joking!'
"I'm not joking," said George peevishly. "Do I look as if I were joking? I met him in Battersea Park with her, and he introduced me. She reminded me," said George Tupper, shivering slightly, for that fearful evening had seared his soul deeply, "of that ghastly female in pink he brought with him the night I gave you two dinner at the Regent Grill - the one who talked at the top of her voice all the time about her aunt's stomach trouble."
Here I think he did Miss Price an injustice. She had struck me during our brief acquaintance as something of a blister, but I had never quite classed her with Battling Billson's Flossie.
(from "No Wedding Bells for Him," by Sir Pelham Wodehouse)
Her cheerful smile as she went out struck me as one of the most pathetic sights I had ever seen. Poor child, bustling off so brightly when her whole future rested on Ukridge's ability to raise a hundred pounds! I presumed that he was relying on one of those Utopian schemes of his which were to bring him in thousands - "at a conservative estimate, laddie!" - and not for the first time in a friendship of years the reflection came to me that Ukridge ought to be in some sort of home. A capital fellow in many respects, but not a man lightly to be allowed at large.
(from "The Return of Battling Billson," by Sir Pelham Wodehouse)
She was a nice girl, the only noticeable flaw in her character being an absurd respect for Ukridge's intelligence and abilities. I, who had known that foe of the human race since boyhood up and was still writhing beneath the memory of the night when he had sneaked my dress clothes, could have corrected her estimate of him, but it seemed unkind to shatter her girlish dreams.
(from "Ukridge Sees Her Through," by Sir Pelham Wodehouse)
Like all writers, I had a sturdy distaste for solid work, and this seemed to offer a pleasant way out, turning literary composition into a jolly tete-a-tete chat. It was only when those gleaming eyes looked eagerly into mine and that twitching pencil poised itself to record the lightest of my golden thoughts that I discovered what I was up against. For fifteen minutes I had been experiencing all the complex emotions of a nervous man who, suddenly called upon to make a public speech, realizes too late that his brain has been withdrawn and replaced by a cheap cauliflower substitute: and I was through.
(from "Ukridge Sees Her Through," by Sir Pelham Wodehouse)
"Alf Todd [a boxer]," said Ukridge, soaring to an impressive burst of imagery, "has about as much chance as a one-armed blind man in a dark room trying to shove a needle of melted butter into a wildcat's left ear with a red-hot needle."
(from "The Return of Battling Billson," by Sir Pelham Wodehouse)
"A lot there is the matter with your ankle."
"Sprained it yesterday, old man. Nothing serious," said Ukridge, reassuringly. Just enough to lay me up for a couple of days."
"Yes, till that ghastly female and her blighted boy had got well away."
Pained astonishment was written all over Ukridge's face. "You don't mean to say you didn't like her? Why, I thought you two would be all over each other."
"And I suppose you thought that Cecil and I would be twin souls."
"Cecil?" said Ukridge, doubtfully. "Well, to tell you the truth, old man, I'm not saying that Cecil doesn't take a bit of knowing. He's the sort of boy you have to be patient with and bring out, if you understand what I mean. I think he grows on you."
"If he ever tries to grow on me, I'll have him amputated."
(from "The Return of Battling Billson," by Sir Pelham Wodehouse)
I perceived a small, shiny boy by the window. Ukridge, realizing with the true artist's instinct that the secret of all successful prose is the knowledge of what to omit, had not mentioned him in his letter; and, as he turned reluctantly to go through the necessary civilities, it seemed to me that the burden was more than I could bear. He was a rat-faced, sinister-loking boy, and he gazed at me with a frigid distaste which reminded me of the barman at the Prince of Wales public house in Ratcliff Highway.
(from "The Return of Battling Billson," by Sir Pelham Wodehouse)
The farther I penetrated over the polished floor, the more vividly was it brought home to me that I was one of the submerged tenth and could have done with a haircut. I had not been aware when I left home that my hair was unusually long, but now I seemed to be festooned by a matted and offensive growth. A patch on my left shoe which had had a rather comfortable look in Ebury Street stood out like a blot on the landscape. No, I was not at my ease; and when I reflected that in a few moments I was to meet Ukridge's aunt, that legendary figure, face to face, a sort of wistful admiration filled me of the beauty of the nature of one who would go through all this to help a girl he had never even met. There was no doubt about it - the facts spoke for themselves - I was one of the finest fellows I had ever known. Nevertheless, there was no getting away from it, my trousers did bag at the knee.
(from "First Aid For Dora," by Sir Pelham Wodehouse)
As she preceded us down the long dining room, her arm linked in George Tupper's - she seemed to have taken a liking to George - I had ample opportunity for studying her, from her patent-leather shoes to the mass of golden hair beneath her picture-hat. She had a loud, clear voice, and she was telling George Tupper the rather intimate details of an internal complaint which had recently troubled an aunt of hers. If George had been the family physician, she could not have been franker; and I could see a dull glow spreading over his shapely ears.
(from "The Debut of Battling Billson, by Sir Pelham Wodehouse)
"There is no excellent beauty that hath not some strangeness in the proportion."
Several decades ago, when I first saw that quote from Sir Francis Bacon in a pictoral collection in Readers Digest, it quickly became one of my favorites. By way of explanation, a face can be so perfect that it becomes almost uninteresting, whereas those with some slight defect by contrast become fascinating, or even hypnotic, and thus an "excellent" beauty.
An example might be the picture that I use for the character of Elliane McDermott in my Sir Cuthbert stories. In the first of the stories, Cuthbert Solves a Case, a friend asks Percy to tell her what it is that he doesn't like about her face, and he lists several supposed defects. She teases him that for someone who doesn't like her face he evidently has spent a good bit of time studying it. And defects they may justly have been, but he ends up marrying her anyway.
"What guarantee have I," demanded Ukridge, "that if I go to enormous trouble and expense getting him another match, he won't turn aside and brush away a silent tear in the first round because he's heard that the blighter's wife has got an ingrowing toenail?"
"You could match him only against bachelors."
"Yes, and the first bachelor he met would draw him into a corner and tell him his aunt was down with whooping-cough, and the chump would heave a sigh and stick his chin out to be walloped. A fellow's got no business to have red hair if he isn't going to live up to it. And yet," said Ukridge, wistfully, "I've seen that man - it was in a dance-hall at Naples - I've seen him take on at least eleven Italians simultaneously. But then, one of them stuck a knife about three inches into his leg. He seems to need something like that to give him ambition."
"I don't see how you are going to arrange to have him knifed just before each fight."
(from "The Debut of Battling Billson," by Sir Pelham Wodehouse)
"Gentlemen," said Ukridge, "It would seem that the company requires more capital. Hw about it, old horses? Let's get together in a frank, business-like cards-on-the-table spirit, and see what can be done. I can raise ten bob."
"What!" cried the entire assembled company, amazed. "How?"
"I'll pawn a banjo."
"You haven't got a banjo."
"No, but George Tupper has, and I know where he keeps it."
(from "Ukridge's Accident Syndicate," by Sir Pelham Wodehouse)
All over the inhabited globe, so the well-informed sheet gave one to understand, every kind of accident was happening every day to practically everybody in existence except Teddy Weeks. Farmers in Minnesota were getting mixed up with reaping machines, peasants in India were being bisected by crocodiles; iron girders from skyscrapers were falling hourly on the heads of citizens in every town from Philadelphia to San Fransisco; and the only people who were not down with ptomaine poisoning were those who had walked over cliffs, driven motors into walls, tripped over manholes, or assumed on too slight evidence that the gun was not loaded. In a crippled world, it seemed, Teddy Weeks walked alone, whole and glowing with health. It was one of those grim, ironical, hopeless, grey, despairful situations which the Russian novelists love to write about.
(from "Ukridge's Accident Syndicate," by Sir Pelham Wodehouse)
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 intimate 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 solemnest of them all by sneaking out at night to try his skill at the coco-nut-shies of the local village fair; and his foresight in putting on scarlet whiskers and a false nose for the expedition was completely neutralized by the fact that he absent-mindedly wore his school cap throughout the entire proceedings. He left the next morning, regretted by all.
(from "Ukridge's Dog College," by Sir Pelham Wodehouse)
