“Well, you look worldly. You wear a squash hat and a soft collar. If you don’t mind my suggesting it, old horse, I think, if I were you, I’d pop off now before she comes out. Good-bye, laddie.”
“Ichabod!” I murmured sadly to myself as I passed on down Oxford Street. “Ichabod!”
I should have had more faith. I should have known my Ukridge better. I should have realised that a London suburb could no more imprison that great man permanently than Elba did Napoleon.
One afternoon, as I let myself into the house in Ebury Street of which I rented at that time the bedroom and sitting-room on the first floor, I came upon Bowles, my landlord, standing in listening attitude at the foot of the stairs.
“Good afternoon, sir,” said Bowles. “A gentleman is waiting to see you. I fancy I heard him calling me a moment ago.”
“Who is he?”
“A Mr. Ukridge, sir. He——”
A vast voice boomed out from above.
“Bowles, old horse!”
Bowles, like all other proprietors of furnished apartments in the south-western district of London, was an ex-butler, and about him, as about all ex-butlers, there clung like a garment an aura of dignified superiority which had never failed to crush my spirit. He was a man of portly aspect, with a bald head and prominent eyes of a lightish green—eyes that seemed to weigh me dispassionately and find me wanting. “H’m!” they seemed to say. “Young—very young. And not at all what I have been accustomed to in the best places.” To hear this dignitary addressed—and in a shout at that—as “old horse” affected me with much the same sense of imminent chaos as would afflict a devout young curate if he saw his bishop slapped on the back. The shock, therefore, when he responded not merely mildly but with what almost amounted to camaraderie was numbing.