Toad Triumphant (3 page)

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