“Yes, but——”
“The fact is, laddie, you don’t realise my potentialities. Recently, it’s true, I’ve allowed myself to become slack and what you might call enervated, but, damme, when I was on that trip in that tramp-steamer, scarcely a week used to go by without my having a good earnest scrap with somebody. Nothing barred,” said Ukridge, musing lovingly on the care-free past, “except biting and bottles.”
“Yes, but, hang it—a professional pugilist!”
“Well, to be absolutely accurate, laddie,” said Ukridge, suddenly dropping the heroic manner and becoming confidential, “the thing’s going to be fixed. Izzy Previn has seen the bloke Thomas’s manager, and has arranged a gentleman’s agreement. The manager, a Class A blood-sucker, insists on us giving his man another twenty pounds after the fight, but that can’t be helped. In return, the Thomas bloke consents to play light for three rounds, at the end of which period, laddie, he will tap me on the side of the head and I shall go down and out, a popular loser. What’s more, I’m allowed to hit him hard—once—just so long as it isn’t on the nose. So you see, a little tact, a little diplomacy, and the whole thing fixed up as satisfactorily as anyone could wish.”
“But suppose the audience demands its money back when they find they’re going to see a substitute?”
“My dear old horse,” protested Ukridge, “surely you don’t imagine that a man with a business head like mine overlooked that? Naturally, I’m going to fight as Battling Billson. Nobody knows him in this town. I’m a good big chap, just as much a heavy-weight as he is. No, laddie, pick how you will you can’t pick a flaw in this.”
“Why mayn’t you hit him on the nose?”
“I don’t know. People have these strange whims. And now, Corky, my boy, I think you had better leave me. I ought to relax.”
The Oddfellows’ Hall was certainly filling up nicely when I arrived that night. Indeed, it seemed as though Llunindnno’s devotees of sport would cram it to the roof. I took my place in the line before the pay-window, and, having completed the business end of the transaction, went in and enquired my way to the dressing-rooms. And presently, after wandering through divers passages, I came upon Ukridge, clad for the ring and swathed in his familiar yellow mackintosh.
“You’re going to have a wonderful house,” I said. “The populace is rolling up in shoals.”