“Of course it is,” whispered Lawlor. “Be quiet!”
“Then, damme,” shouted Ukridge, “rely on me, young Boko. I shall be at your side. I shall spare no efforts to pull you through. You can count on me to——”
“Really! Please! At that table down there,” said the President, rising, while H. K. Hodger, who had got as far as “Then, faith and begob, it’s me that’ll be afther——” paused in a pained manner and plucked at the table-cloth.
Ukridge subsided. But his offer of assistance was no passing whim, to be lightly forgotten in the slumbers of the night. I was still in bed a few mornings later when he burst in, equipped for travel to the last button and carrying a seedy suit-case.
“Just off, laddie, just off!”
“Fine!” I said. “Good-bye.”
“Corky, my boy,” boomed Ukridge, sitting creakingly on the bed and poisoning the air with his noisome tobacco, “I feel happy this morning. Stimulated. And why? Because I am doing an altruistic action. We busy men of affairs, Corky, are too apt to exclude altruism from our lives. We are too prone to say ‘What is there in it for me?’ and, if there proves on investigation to be nothing in it for us, to give it the miss-in-balk. That is why this business makes me so confoundedly happy. At considerable expense and inconvenience I am going down to Redbridge to-day, and what is there in it for me? Nothing. Nothing, my boy, except the pure delight of helping an old schoolfellow over a tough spot. If I can do anything, however little, to bring young Boko in at the right end of the poll, that will be enough reward for me. I am going to do my bit, Corky, and it may be that my bit will turn out to be just the trifle that brings home the bacon. I shall go down there and talk——”
“I bet you will.”
“I don’t know much about politics, it’s true, but I can bone up enough to get by. Invective ought to meet the case, and I’m pretty good at invective. I know the sort of thing. You accuse the rival candidate of every low act under the sun, without giving him quite enough to start a libel action on. Now, what I want you to do, Corky, old horse——”
“Oh heavens!” I moaned at these familiar words.