‘A kindly thought.’
‘A fatheaded thought. And so I told her. A nice chump I should have looked, being disembowelled by port officials.’
Lord Ickenham sighed.
‘I see. Well, I’m sorry. A wealthy husband like you would have come in very handy for Sally. I’m afraid that girl is on the rocks.’
Pongo’s lower jaw dropped a notch. Love might be dead, but he had a feeling heart.
‘Oh, I say!’
‘I don’t believe she gets enough to eat.’
‘What rot!’
‘It isn’t rot. She seemed thin to me, and I didn’t like the way she tucked into the lamb and green peas, as if she hadn’t had a square meal for weeks. There can’t be a fortune in sculping, if that’s the right verb. Who the dickens buys clay busts?’
‘Oh, that’s all right,’ said Pongo, relieved. ‘She doesn’t depend on her sculping. She’s got a little bit of money an aunt in Kansas City left her.’
‘I know. But I’m wondering whether something hasn’t gone wrong with that sheet anchor. It’s two years since she came to London to join Otis. He may have wheedled it out of her. A chap like Otis can do a lot in two years.’
‘Sally’s got too much sense.’
‘The most level-headed girls often prove perfect mugs where a loved brother is concerned. At any rate, in answer to a recent communication of mine telling her that I hoped shortly to be in London and would like her to keep an evening free for dinner I got a letter saying she was glad I was coming up, because she wanted to see me on a very urgent matter. She underlined the “very”. I didn’t like the ring of that statement. It was the sort of thing you used to write to me in the old days, when you were having a passing unpleasantness with your bookie and hoped to float a small loan. Well, I shall be seeing her tomorrow, and I will institute a probe. Poor little Sally, I hope to God she’s all right. What an admirable girl she is.’
‘Yes.’
‘You still feel that, do you?’
‘Oh, rather. I’m frightfully fond of Sally. I tried to do her a bit of good just before I left for America. Hermione told me old Bostock wanted a bust of himself, to present to the village club, and I got her to put him on to Sally. I thought she might be glad of the commish.’
‘Well, well. An impulsive girl would be touched by a thing like that. Yes, indeed. “The whitest man I know,” one can hear her saying. I believe, if you played your cards right, you could still marry her, Pongo.’
‘Aren’t you overlooking the trifling fact that I happen to be engaged to Hermione?’
‘Slide out of it.’
‘Ha!’
‘It is what your best friends would advise. You are a moody, introspective young man, all too prone to look on the dark side of things. I shall never forget you that day at the Dog Races. Sombre is the only word to describe your attitude as the cop’s fingers closed on your coat collar. You reminded me of Hamlet. What you need is a jolly, lively wife to take you out of yourself, the sort of wife who would set booby traps for the Bishop when he came to spend the night. I don’t suppose this Hermione Bostock of yours ever made so much as an apple-pie bed in her life. I’d give her a miss. Send her an affectionate telegram saying you’ve changed your mind and it’s all off. I have a telegraph form in my study.’
A look of intense devoutness came over Pongo’s face.
‘For your information, Uncle Fred, wild horses wouldn’t make me break my engagement.’
‘Most unlikely they’ll ever try.’
‘I worship that girl. There’s nothing I wouldn’t do for her. Well, to give you a rough idea, I told her I was a teetotaller. And why? Purely because she happened one day to express the hope that I wasn’t like so many of these modern young suction pumps, always dropping in at bars and lowering a couple for the tonsils. “Me?” I said. “Good Lord, no. I never touch the stuff.” That’ll show you.’
‘So when you get to Ashenden —’
‘— They’ll uncork the barley water and bring on the lemonade. I know. I’ve foreseen that. It’ll be agony, but I can take it. For her sake. I worship her, I tell you. If H. Bostock isn’t an angel in human shape, then I don’t know an angel in human shape when I see one. Until now I have never known what love was.’
‘Well, you have had ample opportunity of finding out. I have watched you with tender solicitude through about fifty-seven romances, starting with that freckled child with the missing front tooth at the dancing class, who blacked your eye with a wooden dumb-bell when you kissed her in the cloak-room, and ending with this —‘
Lord Ickenham paused, and Pongo eyed him narrowly.
‘Well? This what?’
‘This gruesome combination of George Eliot, Boadicea and the late Mrs Carrie Nation,’ said Lord Ickenham. ‘This flashing-eyed governess. This twenty-minute egg with whom no prudent man would allow himself to walk alone down a dark alley.’
It was enough. Pongo rose, a dignified figure.
‘Shall we join the ladies?’ he said coldly.
‘There aren’t any,’ said Lord Ickenham.
‘I don’t know why I said that,’ said Pongo, annoyed. ‘What I meant was, let’s stop talking bally rot and go and have a game of billiards.’
3
It was with a light heart and a gay tra-la-la on his lips that Pongo Twistleton set out for Ashenden Manor on the following afternoon, leaving Lord Ickenham, who was not embarking on his metropolitan jaunt till a few hours later, waving benevolently from the front steps.
Nothing so braces a young man in love as the consciousness of having successfully resisted a Tempter who has tried to lure him into a course of action of which the adored object would not approve: and as he recalled the splendid firmness with which he had tied the can to his Uncle Fred’s suggestion of a pleasant and instructive afternoon in London, Pongo felt spiritually uplifted.
Pleasant and instructive afternoon, forsooth! Few people have ever come nearer to saying ‘Faugh!’ than did Pongo as Lord Ickenham’s phrase shot through his wincing mind like some loathsome serpent. The crust of the old buster, daring to suggest pleasant and instructive afternoons to a man who had put that sort of thing behind him once and for all. With a shudder of distaste he thrust the whole degrading episode into the hinterland of his consciousness, and turned his thoughts to a more agreeable theme, the coming meeting with Hermione’s parents.
This, he was convinced, was going to be a riot from the word Go. He had little data about these two old geezers, of course, but he presumed that they were intelligent old geezers, able to spot a good man when they saw one, and it seemed, accordingly, pretty obvious that a fellow like himself — steady, upright, impervious to avuncular wheedlings and true blue from soup to nuts — would have them eating out of his hand in the first minute. ‘My dear, he’s charming!’ they would write to Hermione, and bluff Sir Aylmer, whom he pictured as a sort of modern Cheeryble Brother, would say to Lady Bostock (gentle, sweet-faced, motherly), as they toddled up to bed at the conclusion of a delightful first evening, ‘Gad, my dear, nothing much wrong with that young chap, what?’ — or possibly ‘What, what?’ He looked forward with bright confidence to grappling them to his soul with hoops of steel.
It was consequently with some annoyance that he found on reaching his destination that there was going to be a slight delay before this desirable state of affairs could be consummated. The first essential preliminary to grappling a householder and his wife to your soul with hoops of steel is that you should be able to get into the house they are holding, and this, he discovered, presented unforeseen difficulties.
Ashenden Manor was one of those solidly built edifices which date from the days when a home was not so much a place for putting on the old slippers and lighting the pipe, as a fortress to be defended against uncouth intruders with battering rams. Its front door was stout and massive, and at the moment tightly closed. Furthermore, the bell appeared to be out of order. He leaned against the button with his full weight for
a while, but it soon became clear that this was going to get him nowhere, and the necessity of taking alternative action presented itself.
It was at this point that he observed not far from where he stood an open French window, and it seemed to him that he had found a formula. A bit irregular, perhaps, to start your first visit to a place by strolling in through windows, but a kindly, hearty old boy like Sir Aylmer Bostock would overlook that. Abandoning the front door, accordingly, as a lost cause, he stepped through, and an instant later was experiencing the unpleasant shock which always came to people who found themselves for the first time in the room where the ex-Governor kept the African curios which he had collected during his years of honourable exile. Sir Aylmer Bostock’s collection of African curios was probably the most hideous, futile and valueless that even an ex-Governor had ever brought home with him, and many of its items seemed to take Pongo into a different and a dreadful world.
And he had picked up and started to scrutinize the nearest to hand, a peculiar sort of what-not executed in red mud by an artist apparently under the influence of trade gin, and was wondering why even an untutored African should have been chump enough to waste on an effort like this hours which might have been more profitably employed in chasing crocodiles or beaning the neighbours with his knobkerrie, when a voice, having in it many of the qualities of the Last Trump, suddenly split the air.
‘REGINALD!’
Starting violently, Pongo dropped the what-not. It crashed to the floor and became a mere macédoine. A moment later, a burly figure appeared in the doorway, preceded by a large white moustache.
At about the moment when Pongo at Ickenham Hall was springing to the wheel of his Buffy-Porson and pressing a shapely foot on the self-starter, Sir Aylmer Bostock had gone to his wife’s bedroom on the first floor of Ashenden Manor to mend a broken slat in the Venetian blind. He was a man who liked to attend to these little domestic chores himself, and he wanted to have it ready when the midday train brought Lady Bostock back from London, where she had been spending a week with her daughter Hermione.
In predicting that this old schoolmate of his would feel chagrined at Bill Oakshott’s failure to co-operate in the civic welcome which he had gone to such trouble to arrange for him, Lord Ickenham had shown sound judgment of character. When an ex-Governor, accustomed for years to seeing his official receptions go like clockwork, tastes in a black hour the bitterness of failure and anti-climax, pique is bound to supervene. Fists will be clenched, oaths breathed, lower lips bitten. And this is particularly so if the ex-Governor is one whose mental attitude, even under the most favourable conditions, resembles, as did Sir Aylmer Bostock’s, that of a trapped cinnamon bear. As he worked, his brow was dark, his moustache bristling, and from time to time he snorted in a quiet undertone.
He yearned for his wife’s company, so that he could pour into her always receptive ear the story of his wrongs, and soon after he had put the finishing touches to the broken slat he got it. A cab drove up to the front door, and presently Lady Bostock appeared, a woman in the late forties who looked like a horse.
‘Oh, there you are, dear,’ she said brightly. In conversation with her consort she was nearly always obliged to provide brightness enough for both of them. She paused, sniffing. ‘What a curious smell there is in here.’
Sir Aylmer frowned. He resented criticism, even of his smells.
‘Glue,’ he said briefly. ‘I’ve been mending the blind.’
‘Oh, how clever of you, darling. Thank you so much,’ said Lady Bostock, brighter than ever. ‘Well, I suppose you thought I was never coming back. It’s lovely to be home again. London was terribly stuffy. I thought Hermione was looking very well. She sent all sorts of messages to you and Reginald. Has he arrived yet?’
On the point of asking who the devil Reginald was, Sir Aylmer remembered that his daughter had recently become betrothed to some young pot of cyanide answering to that name. He replied that Reginald had not yet arrived.
‘Hermione said he was coming today. ‘‘Well, he hasn’t.’
‘Has he wired?’
‘No.’
‘I suppose he forgot.’
‘Silly fatheaded young poop,’ said Sir Aylmer.
Lady Bostock regarded him anxiously. She seemed to sense in his manner an anti-Reginald bias, and she knew his work. He was capable, she was aware, when in anything like shape, of reducing young men who had failed to arouse his enthusiasm to spots of grease in a matter of minutes, and she was intensely desirous that no such disaster should occur on the present occasion. Hermione, seeing her off at Waterloo, had issued definite instructions that her loved one, while at Ashenden Manor, was to enjoy the status of an ewe lamb, and Hermione was a girl whom it did not do to cross. She expected people to carry out her wishes, and those who knew what was good for them invariably did so.
Recalling all the timid young aides-de-camp whom she had seen curling up at the edges like scorched paper beneath his glare during those long and happy years in Lower Barnatoland, she gazed at her husband pleadingly.
‘You will be nice to Reginald, dear, won’t you?’
‘I am always nice.’
‘I don’t want him to complain to Hermione about his unwelcome. You know what she is like.’
A thoughtful silence fell, as they allowed their minds to dwell on what Hermione was like. Lady Bostock broke it on a note of hope.
‘You may become the greatest friends.’
‘Bah!’
‘Hermione says he is delightful.’
‘Probably the usual young pest with brilliantined hair and a giggle,’ said Sir Aylmer morosely, refusing to look for the silver lining and try to find the sunny side of life. ‘It’s bad enough having William around. Add Reginald, and existence will become a hell.’
His words reminded Lady Bostock that there was a topic on which an affectionate aunt ought to have touched earlier.
‘William has arrived, then?’
‘Yes. Oh, yes, he’s arrived.’
‘I hope the reception went off well. Such a good idea, I thought, when you told me about it. How surprised he must have been. It’s so fortunate that he should have come back in good time for the fete. He is always so useful, looking after the sports. Where is he?’
‘I don’t know. Dead, I hope ….’
‘Aylmer! What do you mean?’
Sir Aylmer had not snorted since his wife’s return and now it was as if all the snorts he might have been snorting had coalesced into one stupendous burst of sound. It was surprising that Pongo, at the moment driving in through the main gates, did not hear it and think one of his tyres had gone.
‘I’ll tell you what I mean. Do you know what that young hound did? Didn’t get out at Ashenden Oakshott. Remained skulking in the train, went on to Bishop’s Ickenham and turned up hours later in a car belonging to Lord Ickenham, stewed to the gills.’
One hastens to protest that this was a complete mis-statement, attributable solely to prejudice and bitterness of spirit. Considering that he had arrived there reeling beneath the blow of the discovery that the girl he loved was betrothed to another, Bill Oakshott had comported himself at Lord Ickenham’s residence with the most exemplary abstemiousness. In a situation where many men would have started lowering the stuff by the pailful, this splendid young fellow had exercised an iron self-control. One fairly quick, followed by another rather slower, and he had been through.
It is true that on encountering his uncle his manner had been such as to give rise to misunderstanding, but something of this kind is bound to happen when a nervous young man meets an incandescent senior, of whom he has always stood in awe, knowing that it is he who has brought him to the boil. In such circumstances the face inevitably becomes suffused and the limbs start twitching, even if the subject is a lifelong abstainer.
So much for this monstrous charge.
Lady Bostock made that clicking noise, like a wet finger touching hot iron, which women use as a substitute for the masculi
ne ‘Well, I’ll be damned!’
‘A car belonging to Lord Ickenham?’
‘Yes.’
‘But how did he come to be in a car belonging to Lord Ickenham?’
‘They appear to have met on the train.
‘Oh, I see. I was wondering, because we don’t know him.’
‘I used to, forty years ago. We were at school together. Haven’t seen him since, thank God. He’s a lunatic.’
‘I have always heard that he was very eccentric.’ Lady Bostock paused, listening. ‘Hark. There’s a car driving up. It must be Reginald. You had better go down.’
‘I won’t go down,’ said Sir Aylmer explosively. ‘Blast Reginald. Let him cool his heels for a bit. I’m going to finish telling you about William.’
‘Yes, dear. Do, dear. He does seem to have behaved most oddly. Had he any explanation?’
‘Oh, he had his story all ready, trust him for that. Said he went to sleep and woke up to find himself at Bishop’s Ickenham. I didn’t swallow a word of it. What happened, obviously, was that on seeing the preparations made for his reception he lost his nerve and remained in the train, the young toad, leaving me to get the Vicar, his wife, a Silver Band, ten Boy Scouts and fourteen members of the Infants’ Bible Class back to their homes without any of them starting a riot. And let me tell you it was a very near thing once or twice. Those Bible Class infants were in ugly mood.’
‘It must have been dreadfully disappointing for you all.’
‘That’s not the worst of it. It has probably lost me hundreds of votes.’
‘Oh, but, dear, why? It wasn’t your fault.’
‘What does that matter? People don’t reason. The news of a fiasco like that flies all over the country. One man tells another. It gets about that I have been placed in a ridiculous position, and the voters lose confidence in me. And nothing to be done about it. That is the bitter thought. You can’t put a fellow of William’s age and size across your knee and get at him with the back of a hairbrush…. COME IN.’
There had been a knock on the door. It was followed by the entry of Jane, the parlourmaid.
Uncle Dynamite Page 3