A Few Quick Ones (21 page)

Their mission proved a complete success. I was at the bat the next morning, having one for the tonsils, when Oofy blew in, and from the fact that the eyes were aglow and his pimples gleaming, I deduced that he had spotted a chance of making money. In repose, as you know, Oofy’s eyes are like those of a dead fish, but if he thinks he sees a way of adding to his disgustingly large bank balance, they glitter with a strange light.

“I say,” he said, “do you know anything about wrestling? Professional wrestling, I mean. The all-in stuff. Good box-office value, isn’t it?”

I said that I had always understood so, especially up North.

“So this chap Waterbury says. Yesterday,” explained Oofy, :Freddy Widgeon brought a fellow to see me, and he placed a proposition before me which looks dashed good. It seems that he knows a couple of all-in wrestlers, and he wants me to advance two hundred quid for working capital, the scheme being that we hire a hall in one of these Northern manufacturing towns and put these birds on and clean up. He says we can safely bill the thing as a European championship, because nobody up there is going to know if a wrestler is a champion or not. Then we have a return match, and after that the rubber match, and then we start all over again somewhere else. There ought to be a pot of money in it.”

My heart was heavy at the thought of Oofy making more money, but I had to agree. Such a series of contests, I felt, could scarcely fail to bring home the bacon. Blood in these Northern manufacturing towns is always very rich and sporting, and it was practically a certainty that the inhabitants would amble up in their thousands.

"I'm going down to a pub at Barnes this afternoon to have a look at the fellows. From what Waterbury tells me, there seems no doubt that they are the goods. I shall probably make a fortune. There is the purse, of course, and Waterbury's cut, and I'm paying Freddie a ten per cent commission, but even so the profits ought to be enormous."

He licked his lips, and feeling that this might possibly be my moment, I asked him if he could lend me a fiver till Wednesday. He said No, he ruddy well could not, and the episode closed.

At two o'clock that afternoon, Oofy bowled down in his princely sports model two-seater to the White Stag, Barnes, and at twenty to three, Jas Waterbury, looking greasier than ever, was introducing him to the two catch-as-catch-canners.

It was a breath-taking experience. His first emotion, he tells me, was one of surprise that so much human tonnage could have been assembled in one spot. A cannibal king, beholding them, would have whooped with joy and reached for his knife and fork with the feeling that for once the catering department had not failed him; and if you could have boiled them down for tallow, you would have had enough ha'penny dips to light the homes of all the residents of Barnes for about a year and a quarter.

Reading from left to right, the pair consisted of an obese bounder who looked like a gorilla which has been doing itself too well on the bananas and a second obese bounder who would have made a hippopotamus seem streamlined. They had small, glittering eyes, no foreheads and more hair all over than you would have believed possible.

Jas Waterbury did the honours.

"Mr. Porky Jupp and Mr. Plug Bosher."

The Messrs. Jupp and Bosher said they were pleased to meet Oofy, but Oofy wasn't so sure he could look at the thing from the same kindly angle. The thought crossed his mind that if, when walking down a lonely alley on a moonless night, he had had to meet two of his fellow men, these were the two he would have picked last. Their whole personalities gave him the impression that neither was safe off the chain.

This conviction grew as he watched the exhibition bout which they put on for his benefit. It was like witnessing a turn-up between two pluguglies of the Stone Age. They snorted and gurgled and groaned and grunted and rolled on each other and jumped on each other and clutched each other's throats and bashed each other's faces and did the most extraordinary things to each other's stomachs. The mystery to Oofy was that they didn't come unstuck.

When the orgy scene was over, he was pale beneath his pimples and panting like a stag at bay, but convinced beyond the possibility of doubt that this was the stuff to give the rugged dwellers up North. As soon as he could get his breath back, he informed Jas Waterbury that he would write out a cheque immediately: and this having been done, they parted; Jas Waterbury and the almost humans leaving for a cottage in the country, where the latter could conduct their training out of reach of the temptations of the great city, and Oofy tooling home in the two-seater with the comfortable feeling that in the not distant future his current account would be swelling up as if it had got dropsy.

It had been Oofy's original intention, partly in order to keep a fatherly eye on his investment and partly because he wanted to watch the mass murderers pirouetting on each other's stomachs again, to look in at the training camp pretty shortly. But what with one thing and another, he didn't seem able to get around to it, and a couple of weeks passed with him still infesting the metrop.

However, he presumed Jas Waterbury was carrying on all right. He pictured Jas sweating away in and around the cottage, not sparing himself, a permanent blot on the rural scene. It surprised him, accordingly, when one morning Freddie Widgeon came into the Club and told him that the blighter was waiting in the hall.

"Looking dashed solemn and sinister," said Freddie. 'His manner, as he touched me for two bob, was strange and absent, I say, you don't think anything's gone wrong with the works, do you?"

This was precisely what Oofy was thinking. The presence of this greasy bird in Dover Street, W., when he should have been slithering about in the depths of the country, put him into a twitter. He legged it to the hall, followed by Freddie, and found Jas Waterbury chewing a dead cigar and giving the club appointments an approving once over.

"Nice little place you've got here. Pip, pip," said Jas Waterbury.

Oofy was in no mood for chit-chat.

"Never mind about my nice little place. What about your nice little place? Why aren't you at the cottage with the thugs?"

"Exactly," said Freddie. "Your place is at their side."

"Well, the fact is, cockies," said Jas Waterbury, "an awkward situation has arisen, and I thought we ought to have a conference. They've gone and had a quarrel. There's been a rift within the lute, if you understand the expression, and it looks as if it was spreading."

Oofy could make nothing of this. Nor could Freddie. Oofy asked what the dickens that mattered, and Freddie asked what the dickens that mattered, too.

"I'll tell you what it matters, cockies," said Jas Waterbury, putting his cigar gravely behind his ear and looking like a chunk of margarine with a secret sorrow. "Unless we can heal the rift, ruin stares us in the eyeball." And in a few crisp words he explained the inwardness of the situation.

Professional wrestling, it seems, is a highly delicate and scientific business which you can't just bung into a haphazard spirit, relying for your effects on the inspiration of the moment. Aggravated acts of mayhem like those perpetrated by Porky Jupp and Plug Bosher come to flower only after constant rehearsal, each move, down to the merest gnashing of the teeth, being carefully thought out in the quiet seclusion of the study and polished to the last button with unremitting patience. Otherwise the thing doesn't look right, and audiences complain.

Obviously, then, what you require first and foremost in a couple of wrestlers whom you are readying for the arena, is a mutual sympathy and a cordial willingness to collaborate. And until recently such a sympathy had existed between Porky Jupp and Plug Bosher in abundant measure, each helping each and working unselfishly together for the good of the show.

To give them an instance of what he meant, said Jas

Waterbury, Porky would come along one day, after musing apart for a while, and suggest that Plug should sock him on the nose, because it would be a swell effect and he never felt anything when socked on the nose except a rather agreeable tickling sensation. Upon which, Plug, not to be outdone in the courtesies, would place his stomach unreservedly at the other's disposal, inviting him to jump up and down on it to his heart's content; he having so much stomach that he scarcely noticed it if people did buck-and-wings on the outskirts.

"Just a couple of real good pals," said Jas Waterbury, "like what's-his-name and who-was-it in the Bible. It was beautiful to see their team work. But now they've come over all nasty, and what's to be what I might call the upshot is more than I can tell you. If there hadn't been this rift within the lute, we'd have had a fine, stirring performance full of entertainment value and one long thrill from start to finish, but if they're going to be cross with each other, it won't look like anything. It'll all be over in a couple of minutes, because Plug can always clean up Porky with one hand if he wants to. And then what? People throwing pop bottles and yelling 'Fake!' "

"Well, that won't matter," said Oofy, pointing out the bright side. "They'll already have paid for their seats."

"And what about the return match? And the rubber match? If the first show's a flop, it'll get around and we'll be playing to empty benches."

They saw what he was driving at now, and Freddie, all of a doodah at the prospect of losing his commish, uttered a low cry and sucked feverishly at the knob of his umbrella. As for Oofy, a look of anguish passed over his face, leaping from pimple to pimple like the chamois of the Alps from crag to crag and he asked how far the breach had widened. Were relations between these two garrotters really so very strained?"

"Well, they're still speaking to each other."

"That's good."

"No, that's bad," corrected Jas Waterbury. "Because every time they open their mouths, it's to make a dirty crack. I tell you, if you want to see your money back, you'd better come and try and reason with them."

Oofy said his two-seater was at the door, and they would start at once. Freddie wanted to come, too, but Oofy wouldn't let him. When you're all in a dither, with ruin staring you in the eyeball, you don't want to be hampered by Freddie Widgeon. Jas Waterbury asked Freddie if he could lend him a couple of bob, and Freddie said he had lent him a couple of bob, and Jas Waterbury said Oh sorry, he had forgotten, and didn't that just show what a state of mind he was in ? He and Oofy popped off.

To say that Oofy was all in a dither is really to give too feeble a picture of his emotions. They were such that only a top-notcher like Shakespeare could have slapped them down on paper, and he would have had to go all out.

What made his head swim was the mystery of the thing. Here were a couple of birds who for years had apparently been two minds with but a single thought, and their ancient friendship had suddenly taken the knock. Why? For what reason? He sought in vain for a reply.

It seemed hours before they got to journey's end. When they did, a single glance was enough to show Oofy that Jas Waterbury knew a rift within the lute when he saw one. The two gorillas were plainly on the chilliest of terms. And when he watched them wrestle, he saw exactly what Jas had meant.

All the spirit had gone out of the thing. Plug Bosher still socked Porky Jupp on the nose, but coldly and formally, and when Porky jumped on Plug's stomach it was with a frigid aloofness which, if exhibited before a paying audience, must inevitably have brought out the pop bottles like hailstones.

Oofy stayed on to dinner, and when it was over and Plug and Porky had gone off to bed without saying goodnight to one another, Jas Waterbury looked at him with despondency written all over his greasy face. It was obvious that only the fact of his having no soul prevented the iron entering into it.

"You see. Not a hope."

But Oofy had perked up amazingly. His quick intelligence had enabled him by now to spot the root of the trouble. When there is money in the offing, Oofy thinks like lightning."

"Not at all," he replied. "Tails up, Jas Waterbury. The sun is still shining."

Jas Waterbury said he didn't see any ruddy sun, and Oofy said "possibly not, but it was there all right and would shortly come smiling through."

"The thing is quite simple, I was on to it in a second directly we started dinner, if you can call it dinner. All that has happened is that these two bounders have got dyspepsia.”

His companion's eyebrows rose, and he uttered a sharp "Gorblimey!" Whoever heard of wrestlers getting dyspepsia, he asked incredulously, adding that he had once known one who lived on pickled pig's trotters and ice cream, washing the mixture down with sparkling limado, a beverage to which he was greatly attached.

"And, what's more, throve on it. Blossomed like a rose in June."

"Quite," said Oofy. "No doubt wrestlers can eat almost anything. Nevertheless, there is a point beyond which the human stomach, be it even that of a wrestler, cannot be pushed, and that point has been reached - nay, passed ' m this establishment. The meal of which we have just partaken was the sort of meal an inexperienced young female buzzard might have prepared for her newly married buzzard husband. When I was a boy, I had a goat that ate brass door knobs. That goat would have passed up tonight's steak with a dainty shudder of distaste. Who does the cooking in this joint? Lucrezia Borgia?"

"A woman comes from the village."

"Then tell her to go back to the village and jolly well stay there, and I'll look in at a good agency tomorrow and get somebody who knows how to cook. You'll soon see the difference. Porky Jupp will become all smiles, and Plug Bosher will skip like the high hills. A week from now I confidently expect to find them chewing each other's ears and bashing each other's noses with all the old matey-ness and camaraderie."

Jas Waterbury said he believed Oofy was right, and Oofy said he bally well knew he was right.

"Cor! Chase my Aunt Fanny up a gum tree!" cried Jas, infected with his enthusiasm. "You knew something when you said the blinking sun would soon be shining through the blinking clouds, because there it is, all alive-o. But you needn't go to any agencies and be skinned for fees. I'll send for my niece."