Love Among the Chickens u-1

by Pelham Grenville Wodehouse

  “You do,” said I grimly. “I should like to hear it.”

  “Dear sir, listen me.”

  “Go on then.”

  “You came me. You said ‘Hawk, Hawk, ol’ fren’, listen me. You tip this ol’ bufflehead into watter,’ you said, ‘an’ gormed if I don’t give ‘ee a poond note.’ That’s what you said me. Isn’t that what you said me?”

  I did not deny it.

  “‘Ve’ well,’ I said you. ‘Right,’ I said. I tipped the ol’ soul into watter, and I got the poond note.”

  “Yes, you took care of that. All this is quite true, but it’s beside the point. We are not disputing about what happened. What I want to know—for the third time—is what made you let the cat out of the bag? Why couldn’t you keep quiet about it?”

  He waved his hand.

  “Dear sir,” he replied, “this way. Listen me.”

  It was a tragic story that he unfolded. My wrath ebbed as I listened. After all the fellow was not so greatly to blame. I felt that in his place I should have acted as he had done. It was Fate’s fault, and Fate’s alone.

  It appeared that he had not come well out of the matter of the accident. I had not looked at it hitherto from his point of view. While the rescue had left me the popular hero, it had had quite the opposite result for him. He had upset his boat and would have drowned his passenger, said public opinion, if the young hero from London—myself—had not plunged in, and at the risk of his life brought the professor ashore. Consequently, he was despised by all as an inefficient boatman. He became a laughing-stock. The local wags made laborious jests when he passed. They offered him fabulous sums to take their worst enemies out for a row with him. They wanted to know when he was going to school to learn his business. In fact, they behaved as wags do and always have done at all times all the world over.

  Now, all this, it seemed, Mr. Hawk would have borne cheerfully and patiently for my sake, or, at any rate for the sake of the crisp pound note I had given him. But a fresh factor appeared in the problem, complicating it grievously. To wit, Miss Jane Muspratt.

  “She said to me,” explained Mr. Hawk with pathos, “‘Harry ‘Awk,’ she said, ‘yeou’m a girt fule, an’ I don’t marry noone as is ain’t to be trusted in a boat by hisself, and what has jokes made about him by that Tom Leigh!’ “

  “I punched Tom Leigh,” observed Mr. Hawk parenthetically. “‘So,’ she said me, ‘you can go away, an’ I don’t want to see yeou again!’ “

  This heartless conduct on the part of Miss Muspratt had had the natural result of making him confess in self-defence; and she had written to the professor the same night.

  I forgave Mr. Hawk. I think he was hardly sober enough to understand, for he betrayed no emotion. “It is Fate, Hawk,” I said, “simply Fate. There is a Divinity that shapes our ends, rough-hew them how we will, and it’s no good grumbling.”

  “Yiss,” said Mr. Hawk, after chewing this sentiment for a while in silence, “so she said me, ‘Hawk,’ she said—like that—’you’re a girt fule—’ “

  “That’s all right,” I replied. “I quite understand. As I say, it’s simply Fate. Good-bye.” And I left him.

  As I was going back, I met the professor and Phyllis. They passed me without a look.

  I wandered on in quite a fervour of self-pity. I was in one of those moods when life suddenly seems to become irksome, when the future stretches black and grey in front of one. I should have liked to have faded almost imperceptibly from the world, like Mr. Bardell, even if, as in his case, it had involved being knocked on the head with a pint pot in a public-house cellar.

  In such a mood it is imperative that one should seek distraction. The shining example of Mr. Harry Hawk did not lure me. Taking to drink would be a nuisance. Work was what I wanted. I would toil like a navvy all day among the fowls, separating them when they fought, gathering in the eggs when they laid, chasing them across country when they got away, and even, if necessity arose, painting their throats with turpentine when they were stricken with roop. Then, after dinner, when the lamps were lit, and Mrs. Ukridge nursed Edwin and sewed, and Ukridge smoked cigars and incited the gramophone to murder “Mumbling Mose,” I would steal away to my bedroom and write—and write—and /write/. And go on writing till my fingers were numb and my eyes refused to do their duty. And, when time had passed, I might come to feel that it was all for the best. A man must go through the fire before he can write his masterpiece. We learn in suffering what we teach in song. What we lose on the swings we make up on the roundabouts. Jerry Garnet, the Man, might become a depressed, hopeless wreck, with the iron planted immovably in his soul; but Jeremy Garnet, the Author, should turn out such a novel of gloom, that strong critics would weep, and the public jostle for copies till Mudie’s doorway became a shambles.

  Thus might I some day feel that all this anguish was really a blessing—effectively disguised.

  * * *

  But I doubted it.

  * * *

  We were none of us very cheerful now at the farm. Even Ukridge’s spirit was a little daunted by the bills which poured in by every post. It was as if the tradesmen of the neighbourhood had formed a league, and were working in concert. Or it may have been due to thought-waves. Little accounts came not in single spies but in battalions. The popular demand for the sight of the colour of his money grew daily. Every morning at breakfast he would give us fresh bulletins of the state of mind of each of our creditors, and thrill us with the announcement that Whiteley’s were getting cross, and Harrod’s jumpy or that the bearings of Dawlish, the grocer, were becoming overheated. We lived in a continual atmosphere of worry. Chicken and nothing but chicken at meals, and chicken and nothing but chicken between meals had frayed our nerves. An air of defeat hung over the place. We were a beaten side, and we realised it. We had been playing an uphill game for nearly two months, and the strain was beginning to tell. Ukridge became uncannily silent. Mrs. Ukridge, though she did not understand, I fancy, the details of the matter, was worried because Ukridge was. Mrs. Beale had long since been turned into a soured cynic by the lack of chances vouchsafed her for the exercise of her art. And as for me, I have never since spent so profoundly miserably a week. I was not even permitted the anodyne of work. There seemed to be nothing to do on the farm. The chickens were quite happy, and only asked to be let alone and allowed to have their meals at regular intervals. And every day one or more of their number would vanish into the kitchen, Mrs. Beale would serve up the corpse in some cunning disguise, and we would try to delude ourselves into the idea that it was something altogether different.

  There was one solitary gleam of variety in our menu. An editor sent me a cheque for a set of verses. We cashed that cheque and trooped round the town in a body, laying out the money. We bought a leg of mutton, and a tongue and sardines, and pine-apple chunks, and potted meat, and many other noble things, and had a perfect banquet. Mrs. Beale, with the scenario of a smile on her face, the first that she had worn in these days of stress, brought in the joint, and uncovered it with an air.

  “Thank God!” said Ukridge, as he began to carve.

  It was the first time I had ever heard him say a grace, and if ever an occasion merited such a deviation from habit, this occasion did.

  After that we relapsed into routine again.

  Deprived of physical labour, with the exception of golf and bathing—trivial sports compared with work in the fowl-run at its hardest—I tried to make up for it by working at my novel.

  It refused to materialise.

  The only progress I achieved was with my villain.

  I drew him from the professor, and made him a blackmailer. He had several other social defects, but that was his profession. That was the thing he did really well.

  It was on one of the many occasions on which I had sat in my room, pen in hand, through the whole of a lovely afternoon, with no better result than a slight headache, that I bethought me of that little paradise on the Ware Cliff, hung over the sea and backed
by green woods. I had not been there for some time, owing principally to an entirely erroneous idea that I could do more solid work sitting in a straight hard chair at a table than lying on soft turf with the sea wind in my eyes.

  But now the desire to visit that little clearing again drove me from my room. In the drawing-room below the gramophone was dealing brassily with “Mister Blackman.” Outside the sun was just thinking of setting. The Ware Cliff was the best medicine for me. What does Kipling say?

  And soon you will find that the sun and the wind

  And the Djinn of the Garden, too,

  Have lightened the hump, Cameelious Hump,

  The Hump that is black and blue.

  His instructions include digging with a hoe and a shovel also, but I could omit that. The sun and the wind were what I needed.

  I took the upper road. In certain moods I preferred it to the path along the cliff. I walked fast. The exercise was soothing.

  To reach my favourite clearing I had to take to the fields on the left, and strike down hill in the direction of the sea. I hurried down the narrow path.

  I broke into the clearing at a jog trot, and stood panting. And at the same moment, looking cool and beautiful in her white dress, Phyllis entered in from the other side. Phyllis—without the professor.

  Chapter 17.

  Of a Sentimental Nature

  She was wearing a panama, and she carried a sketching-block and camp– stool.

  “Good evening,” I said.

  “Good evening,” said she.

  It is curious how different the same words can sound, when spoken by different people. My “good evening” might have been that of a man with a particularly guilty conscience caught in the act of doing something more than usually ignoble. She spoke like a rather offended angel.

  “It’s a lovely evening,” I went on pluckily.

  “Very.”

  “The sunset!”

  “Yes.”

  “Er—”

  She raised a pair of blue eyes, devoid of all expression save a faint suggestion of surprise, and gazed through me for a moment at some object a couple of thousand miles away, and lowered them again, leaving me with a vague feeling that there was something wrong with my personal appearance.

  Very calmly she moved to the edge of the cliff, arranged her camp– stool, and sat down. Neither of us spoke a word. I watched her while she filled a little mug with water from a little bottle, opened her paint-box, selected a brush, and placed her sketching-block in position.

  She began to paint.

  Now, by all the laws of good taste, I should before this have made a dignified exit. It was plain that I was not to be regarded as an essential ornament of this portion of the Ware Cliff. By now, if I had been the Perfect Gentleman, I ought to have been a quarter of a mile away.

  But there is a definite limit to what a man can do. I remained.

  The sinking sun flung a carpet of gold across the sea. Phyllis’ hair was tinged with it. Little waves tumbled lazily on the beach below. Except for the song of a distant blackbird, running through its repertoire before retiring for the night, everything was silent.

  She sat there, dipping and painting and dipping again, with never a word for me—standing patiently and humbly behind her.

  “Miss Derrick,” I said.

  She half turned her head.

  “Yes.”

  “Why won’t you speak to me?” I said.

  “I don’t understand you.”

  “Why won’t you speak to me?”

  “I think you know, Mr. Garnet.”

  “It is because of that boat accident?”

  “Accident!”

  “Episode,” I amended.

  She went on painting in silence. From where I stood I could see her profile. Her chin was tilted. Her expression was determined.

  “Is it?” I said.

  “Need we discuss it?”

  “Not if you do not wish it.”

  I paused.

  “But,” I added, “I should have liked a chance to defend myself…. What glorious sunsets there have been these last few days. I believe we shall have this sort of weather for another month.”

  “I should not have thought that possible.”

  “The glass is going up,” I said.

  “I was not talking about the weather.”

  “It was dull of me to introduce such a worn-out topic.”

  “You said you could defend yourself.”

  “I said I should like the chance to do so.”

  “You have it.”

  “That’s very kind of you. Thank you.”

  “Is there any reason for gratitude?”

  “Every reason.”

  “Go on, Mr. Garnet. I can listen while I paint. But please sit down. I don’t like being talked to from a height.”

  I sat down on the grass in front of her, feeling as I did so that the change of position in a manner clipped my wings. It is difficult to speak movingly while sitting on the ground. Instinctively I avoided eloquence. Standing up, I might have been pathetic and pleading. Sitting down, I was compelled to be matter-of-fact.

  “You remember, of course, the night you and Professor Derrick dined with us? When I say dined, I use the word in a loose sense.”

  For a moment I thought she was going to smile. We were both thinking of Edwin. But it was only for a moment, and then her face grew cold once more, and the chin resumed its angle of determination.

  “Yes,” she said.

  “You remember the unfortunate ending of the festivities?”

  “Well?”

  “If you recall that at all clearly, you will also remember that the fault was not mine, but Ukridge’s.”

  “Well?”

  “It was his behaviour that annoyed Professor Derrick. The position, then, was this, that I was to be cut off from the pleasantest friendship I had ever formed—”

  I stopped for a moment. She bent a little lower over her easel, but remained silent.

  “—Simply through the tactlessness of a prize idiot.”

  “I like Mr. Ukridge.”

  “I like him, too. But I can’t pretend that he is anything but an idiot at times.”

  “Well?”

  “I naturally wished to mend matters. It occurred to me that an excellent way would be by doing your father a service. It was seeing him fishing that put the idea of a boat-accident into my head. I hoped for a genuine boat-accident. But those things only happen when one does not want them. So I determined to engineer one.”

  “You didn’t think of the shock to my father.”

  “I did. It worried me very much.”

  “But you upset him all the same.”

  “Reluctantly.”

  She looked up, and our eyes met. I could detect no trace of forgiveness in hers.

  “You behaved abominably,” she said.

  “I played a risky game, and I lost. And I shall now take the consequences. With luck I should have won. I did not have luck, and I am not going to grumble about it. But I am grateful to you for letting me explain. I should not have liked you to have gone on thinking that I played practical jokes on my friends. That is all I have to say. I think it was kind of you to listen. Good-bye, Miss Derrick.”

  I got up.

  “Are you going?”

  “Why not?”

  “Please sit down again.”

  “But you wish to be alone—”

  “Please sit down!”

  There was a flush on the cheek turned towards me, and the chin was tilted higher.

  I sat down.

  To westward the sky had changed to the hue of a bruised cherry. The sun had sunk below the horizon, and the sea looked cold and leaden. The blackbird had long since flown.

  “I am glad you told me, Mr. Garnet.”

  She dipped her brush in the water.

  “Because I don’t like to think badly of—people.”

  She bent her head over her painting.

  “Though I
still think you behaved very wrongly. And I am afraid my father will never forgive you for what you did.”

  Her father! As if he counted.

  “But you do?” I said eagerly.

  “I think you are less to blame than I thought you were at first.”

  “No more than that?”

  “You can’t expect to escape all consequences. You did a very stupid thing.”

  “I was tempted.”

  The sky was a dull grey now. It was growing dusk. The grass on which I sat was wet with dew.

  I stood up.

  “Isn’t it getting a little dark for painting?” I said. “Are you sure you won’t catch cold? It’s very damp.”

  “Perhaps it is. And it is late, too.”

  She shut her paint-box, and emptied the little mug on to the grass.

  “May I carry your things?” I said.

  I think she hesitated, but only for a moment.

  I possessed myself of the camp-stool, and we started on our homeward journey.

  We were both silent. The spell of the quiet summer evening was on us.

  “‘And all the air a solemn stillness holds,’ “ she said softly. “I love this cliff, Mr. Garnet. It’s the most soothing place in the world.”

  “I found it so this evening.”

  She glanced at me quickly.

  “You’re not looking well,” she said. “Are you sure you are not overworking yourself?”

  “No, it’s not that.”

  Somehow we had stopped, as if by agreement, and were facing each other. There was a look in her eyes I had never seen there before. The twilight hung like a curtain between us and the world. We were alone together in a world of our own.

  “It is because I had offended you,” I said.

  She laughed a high, unnatural laugh.

  “I have loved you ever since I first saw you,” I said doggedly.

  Chapter 18.

  Ukridge Gives Me Advice

  Hours after—or so it seemed to me—we reached the spot at which our ways divided. We stopped, and I felt as if I had been suddenly cast back into the workaday world from some distant and pleasanter planet. I think Phyllis must have felt much the same sensation, for we both became on the instant intensely practical and businesslike.