Toad Triumphant

by William Horwood

  When talk resumed, it was about inconsequential things such as Mr Toad’s new butler, by whom the Mole was much impressed.

  “I am glad you think so, Mole, for you are certainly right. Prendergast is one of the finest butlers in all the land and has turned down offers of employment from Earls, Dukes and possibly Kings so that he may serve me. Such are the perquisites deriving from the fame and general respect that Toad of Toad Hall is able to command —”

  For this was indeed that same Prendergast who had once been in the employ of no less a personage than the High Judge himself in his great residence east of the Town, in whose welcome confines Toad had once been a fraudulent guest. On that occasion, some two years earlier, which had to do with a trifling matter of a flying machine and a glass—shattering descent by parachute into His Lordship’s hothouse, a curious bond of affection and friendship had grown up between Toad and His Lordship’s butler (now former butler) Prendergast.

  Nobody, in society or out of it, had been more surprised and delighted than Toad when his advertisement in The Times for a manservant had attracted a reply from his old friend — as he thought of him. He naturally, but wrongly, assumed that Prendergast had applied for the post out of respect and the honourable prospect of serving a gentleman as noble, and as famous, as himself. But this was not quite the case.

  The plain fact was that Prendergast had come into a small inheritance from a relative in Australia and though he had no desire to be idle and unemployed, his zest for serving Lords and Ladies of the genuine kind had waned after a quarter of a century in their service at the highest levels. Now he could pick and choose, and, examining the columns under “Menservants” in that august organ one day, he had been astonished and delighted to see that there was a vacancy at Toad Hall.

  Prendergast had many qualities, not all of them quite as conservative as the greatest of butlers generally aspire to.

  In this respect the qualities that Toad’s advertisement had excited were those of adventure, change, and good humour. He had never forgotten Toad’s arrival at His Lordship’s residence, nor the pleasures that came with serving one who was without doubt more vain and self-centred than any he had served before — and one who did that which Lords and Ladies too rarely did: bravely made a fool of himself and, shrugging off one disaster, promptly created another.

  After so many years of sober, dull and unamusing service of the highest rectitude Prendergast had decided that before emigrating forever to Australia he wished to serve — and to serve to the very best of his ability — a master as reprehensible and notorious as Mr Toad of Toad Hall.

  He had desired the post so much that he had felt quite nervous in making his application for it, and had greatly feared that Mr Toad would either not remember him, or would not be willing to have in his employ one who had served that same High Judge before whom Toad had been tried. He was also concerned that he might feel embarrassed to interview for such a post someone who had on two occasions tipped him a shilling — once when Toad had escaped from His Lordship’s House in the guise of a sweep, and then when Toad had been escorted by his gaoler to the edge of the Town after his trial and warned never to return.

  He quite underestimated Toad, who not only remembered him, but remembered him most happily, and was overjoyed to secure such a catch. Their mutual feelings were therefore ones of admiration and even affectionate memory, like two doughty campaigners who, having been through one war together, find themselves thrown together by Fate for another.

  Prendergast’s first duty on arrival — almost before he had removed his coat — had been to assist in the night-time delivery of Toad’s powerful new motor-launch and to secrete it within the boat-house. This was not the kind of duty that normally comes an English butler’s way by night or day, and Prendergast there and then decided that his confidence in Toad was well placed indeed. In all of England’s wide and pleasant land, in all the Empire perhaps, no butler went about his work so happily as Prendergast, and none relished more the challenge of the months ahead. For months only Prendergast had decided it would be, and had told his new employer as much.

  “I am, sir, of course much honoured that you feel I am suitable for this post, but I must give you notice now that I can only accept the position for six months. I have pressing business in the Antipodes and propose to set sail in October at the latest.”

  “My dear fellow,” said Toad heartily at this interview and with that inappropriate familiarity which he carried off so well, “six months will see us on our feet at the rebuilt Toad Hall. Train up the staff in that time and see that my worries and cares are seen to and I shall be well pleased.”

  “It is agreed then, sir,” said Prendergast respectfully.

  The Mole found all this most interesting, but he was now tired and defeated, for from the moment tea had arrived he had been forced to give up all further attempts at seeking Toad’s advice. The story of Prendergast done, all Toad wanted to talk about was the awfulness of having so much money, and the stress and strain of rebuilding Toad Hall and having to cope with an obstructive architect (as it seemed to Toad) and an obtuse and unintelligent clerk of works (as Toad saw it). Meanwhile the Mole, who had heard it all before, could not but notice how warm and soporific the sun felt on his face, how much better he felt for the tea he had just had, how buzzingly the bees seemed to buzz and tunefully the birds to sing — in short, how pleasant things seemed to have become and how unimportant his own little concerns suddenly seemed …

  “Mole! Mole!”

  Toad’s imperious cry awoke the Mole from the blissful sleep into which he had drifted. Evidently he had said all he wanted to about architects, clerks of works, and the difficulty of being the patron of so large a project as the rebuilding of Toad Hall, and now wished to draw the Mole’s attention to something else.

  “Well, Mole, and what do you say to this?”

  The tea things had gone and so had the butler, and the sun had begun to settle a little. Toad held aloft a very large sheet of drawing paper upon which the Mole could see many lines and squiggles, and a good deal of writing. Mole saw that it was a plan to rebuild the garden, and a very clear and thorough one too.

  “Yes, but do you see what is written there, Mole?” moaned Toad. “O, my head throbs and my body aches with the effort of thinking of it all. Can you not help me come to some decision?”

  Mole rubbed his sleepy eyes and tried to focus on where Toad pointed, which was a small area on the plan in which nothing appeared to have been drawn or written at all, and around which a thin black line had been described. No flower beds there it seemed, no trees or walls or fountains. Nothing at all.

  Mole read aloud the words that seemed to have given Toad such trouble: “Client to decide”.

  “Decide what?” asked the Mole.

  “That’s just it. Something has to go there but the landscape architect, brilliant as he is, was unable to decide and has turned to me for help and advice.” .

  “Might it not be that he just wishes you to have a say in the design of at least one small area of your garden?”

  “No,” said Toad peremptorily, dismissing this reasonable and accurate conclusion, “that’s not it at all, Mole. No, he knows he has failed at the final hurdle and looks to me for guidance and decisive help!”

  “It seems,” said the Mole, “that a good deal of the preliminary work has already been done, and already some of the plantings made.”

  The Mole looked at the garden once more, this time with some regret. Gone were the ancient fish ponds and the pigeon house of former times; gone the scented rose beds and the arboured ways where once Toad and his River Bank companions had strolled, he talking in his vain and conceited way, they indulging him. Yet nostalgic though Mole felt, he could not but reflect that it was typical of Toad, and a quality that the Mole rather admired, that it was not the sentimental embrace of the old that held him back, as it held back so many others, but the beckoning of the new that called him forward.

 
; While Toad wrestled with that small area left for him to decide, the Mole tried to imagine the garden as it would one day be and with the plan before him it was not, after all, so difficult. How magnificent and well grown those herbaceous borders would be, with an avenue of limes and a pergolaed walk overhung with honeysuckle and vines, a fountain sparkling in the sun, a sunken garden, a rose bed, two vast and impressive herbaceous borders filled with plants at the peak of their bloom, and down by the River some fresh new willows.

  Quite suddenly the Mole spoke up, saying, “How much I would like to be here to see this garden grown to its full glory once more, how very much. I do admire you, Toad, for your foresight in planning such a thing for future generations.”

  He said these words with gentleness and sincerity, and if there was a moistness in his eyes now it was not for the matter that had so troubled him when he had first come, but rather out of mild regret that while he had his Nephew as a link to future generations, among all their friends along the River Bank, only the Otter had offspring to take things forward. The wayward Portly might still be somewhat unreliable, but soon enough he would grow up to be something more than he now was: the young so often finally surprise the old. He or his young would see this garden grow.

  But for the rest of them, mused the Mole, there was nobody to whom to pass fond memory, or bequeath future hope, and when they were gone they would be all gone, and this grand plan of Toad’s — perhaps the grandest and the best and the most useful he had caused to be made — would be seen by none that were their kin.

  “O my!” whispered the Mole, as much to himself as Toad. “How strangely my thoughts ebb and flow these days, and how much more I seem to see than there really is — perhaps, after all, that is my difficulty and the cause of my distress.”

  Then his eyes moistened once more, but now the Mole discovered that just as he had not been listening to Toad before, now Toad was not listening to him. Instead he was staring fixedly at that vacant plot on the terrace about which he had to decide.

  “There it was all the time and I couldn’t see it!” said Toad in a strange low voice, alarming in its intensity. “How clever I am, but what of that? Genius is not too bold a word. How sensible of this landscape architect to entrust me with the only important decision of the whole design!”

  The Mole had seen his friend in many moods, but he had never seen him quite like this. He watched in astonishment and some disquiet as an extraordinary change came over Toad’s face. His normal look of vanity and conceit mixed with cowardice, self-concern and personal indulgence was slowly supplanted by a look of all-consuming triumph, much as a rising sun consumes the trivial shadows of dawn. This was Toad in alarming transmutation.

  Accompanying this change was another in Toad’s stance, which till then had been somewhat hunched and intense. Now Toad began to straighten and to raise himself up into a pose that seemed to suggest that the terrace was too small for him, and that it would not be very long before the whole garden was too small as well.

  “Why, Toad,” said the Mole quietly, “what is it that you see?”

  Toad turned slowly to him — the Mole could have sworn that he stared down at him as a god might stare down from Mount Olympus — and he said in a strange and distant way, “I have seen the way to immortality.”

  “Immortality?” stuttered the Mole.

  “Yes, immortality,” said Toad. “Now, Mole, leave me, for I have important arrangements and preparations to make.”

  “O dear!” said Mole, for he saw that an unwelcome and all too familiar wildness had returned to Toad’s eyes, a kind of madness, the pursuit of which would surely lead him astray as it had so often done in the past.

  “Immortality has beckoned and I must respond,” said Toad grandly, “even if it means I must leave my friends behind. I hope that at some future time, in some future place we shall meet again.”

  “In some future time and place?” echoed the Mole, now very considerably alarmed. “Are you feeling quite well, Toad? Are you expecting something dire to happen about which you might like to speak?” The Mole had a notion that Toad had seen the spectre of the Grim Reaper, scythe and all, already stalking along the River Bank in their direction, and the Mole did not like it. It betokened delusions of grandeur and excesses of behaviour which so many of Toad’s friends had feared would one day return and finally destroy him.

  “Please, Toad,” said the Mole, “won’t you lie down, for perhaps the sun has gone to your —”

  “Leave now,” said Toad in an unnatural, other-worldly way ‘‘Leave me now!’’

  Such was his gesture of dismissal then — not unkind exactly, but certainly absolute and forbidding — that the Mole could not but obey it. In any case it was quite plain to Mole that this was a matter about which the Badger needed to be informed, and urgently. So the Mole did as Toad bade him, and hurried off down through the garden towards the exit onto the River Bank, alarmed for Toad and somewhat miserable for himself.

  As he reached the gate the Mole turned and looked back up towards the Hall, a sense of fateful foreboding coming over him. What he saw only served to increase it.

  For Toad had moved to that vacant plot that he had been asked to decide about. He now stood within it, his hands and arms raised towards the early evening sky, one leg extended a little behind him and the other doing its best to sustain his weight. The whole effect was emphasized and highlighted by the last rays of a setting sun.

  What Toad was doing was a mystery to the Mole, but what he was hoping to achieve thereby was all too plain: he was seeking immortality, and it could lead to no good, no good at all.

  Whispering “O dear!” to himself several times, and intent upon alerting his friends to the danger, the Mole turned away once more, and passed through the gate from Toad’s estate out onto the River Bank.

  In doing so he had to pass under the notice that the Badger had caused to be erected for the benefit of Toad against the day — distant as it seemed then, all too imminent as it seemed now — when he might again discover some new and dangerous idea and wilfully set off after it without a thought for the consequences to himself, or those along the River Bank: THERE WILL BE NO SECOND CHANCE!

  · II ·

  Mole in the Doldrums

  It had been Mole’s firm intention after his frustrating interview with Toad to forget his own worries and go straight to the Badger to express his concern about their mutual friend’s sudden lapse into behaviour that seemed likely to take him back into his bad old ways.

  But deep and abiding though the Mole’s sense of concern and responsibility for others was, on this occasion his own concerns got the better of him. He reached the bridge, beyond which the path to the Badger’s home lay, but went no further. He paused for a time, stared down into the mysterious depths of the River, and that wistful and disquieting mood that had first led him to Toad’s overtook him once more.

  He turned back and made his lonely and unhappy way to Mole End. There, refusing all conversation with his Nephew, he sought comfort in sleep.

  Before long it was the Mole rather than Toad who had become a cause of concern along the River Bank, for it was plain he had not been his normal cheerful self for many weeks past. His Nephew knew it, the Water Rat knew it, everyone along the River Bank knew it: why, even he seemed to know it. But none of them, not even the Mole himself, seemed to know quite why.

  His Nephew had no explanation, and none of the Mole’s friends seemed able to help. The Water Rat, for example, could make no sense of it at all and grew quite irritable and impatient as the Mole’s gloominess and lack of interest in life continued, while Toad had time only for his own grand plans.

  But Nephew did not give up easily, especially where the welfare of the Mole was concerned. No one in all the world meant more to him and he would leave no stone unturned, no course of action untried, in his efforts to help the Mole back to normality. So he decided to take his courage in his hands and call upon Mr Badger. The wisest of anima
ls, the Badger had lived there longer than any of them, remembering a past none of them had ever known. Indeed, he was the only remaining animal living who could remember Toad’s father.

  Nephew had visited the Badger a good few times alone, yet he always felt a sense of awe as he approached his house. It was not only that the Badger’s moods were unpredictable — on occasion he chose not to answer the door at all — but also the sense of darkness and danger that the Wild Wood inspired in the hearts of those who did not live there. Even in broad daylight on a summer’s day the place seemed dark, the trees huge, and what gaps there were between the trees filled with sinister, shifting shadows; while the rustling thickets, near and far, seemed to creak and groan with ill intent.

  So when he had made his way to the centre of the Wild Wood that day and had finally built up the courage to knock at the Badger’s door, he listened to the sound of movement inside, and then the bolts and chains being drawn and undone, with considerable relief.

  Any fears regarding the Badger’s response were soon dispelled, for he held the Mole in particular affection, and when Nephew explained the seriousness of the situation and his concern that no one had been able to help, the Badger needed little urging to forgo all else and depart for Mole End immediately, leading Nephew by the secret ways of the Wild Wood in silence, deep in contemplation.

  When they arrived at Mole End, the Mole, ever courteous, served tea, and it was some time before the Badger felt he could get to the point.

  “That fact is, Mole, that I’ve come to see you because I understand you are somewhat down in the dumps, and it’s no good denying the fact. I thought you might care to unburden yourself to me?”

  “O, I know you mean it for the best, Badger, and believe me I am greatly honoured that you have made this call on me, but I assure you there is nothing wrong,” responded the Mole.

  “Nothing at all?” queried the Badger, rather stumped by the Mole’s calm denials.

  “Nothing, really nothing,” averred the Mole before adding, to change the subject, “now, please, have another cup of tea. Nephew, put that kettle on again and bring out that extra plate of cucumber sandwiches I prepared earlier —”