Uncle Fred in the Springtime (20 page)

‘Lawn,’
said Ricky, looking over his shoulder. ‘I see.’

‘Now
along here, round the end of the lawn, curves the drive. It curves past a thick
shrubbery — that’s at the farther side of the lawn — and then curves past a
meadow which adjoins the kitchen garden. In this meadow,’ said the Duke,
marking the spot with a cross, ‘is the sty where the pig resides. You see the
strategic significance of this?’

‘No,’
said Ricky.

‘Nor
did I,’ admitted the Duke handsomely, ‘till I was brushing my teeth this
morning. Then it suddenly flashed on me.’

‘You
have an extraordinarily fine brain, Uncle Alaric. I’ve sometimes thought you
would have made a great general.’

‘Look
at it for yourself. Anybody removing that pig from its sty could dive .into the
shrubbery with it, thus securing excellent cover, and the only time he would be
in danger of being observed would be when he was crossing the lawn to my room.
And I propose to select a moment for the operation when there will be no
eye-witnesses.’

Ricky
blinked.

‘I don’t
quite follow that, Uncle Alaric. You aren’t going to keep the animal in your
room?’

‘That
is exactly what I am going to do. It’s on the ground floor, with serviceable
french windows. What simpler than to bring the pig in through these windows and
lodge it in the bathroom?’

‘What,
and keep it there all night?’

‘Who
said anything about night? It enters the bathroom at two o’clock in the afternoon.
Use your intelligence. At two o’clock in the afternoon everyone’s at lunch.
Butler, footmen and so forth, all in the dining-room. Maids of all
descriptions, their work in the bedrooms completed during the morning, in the
kitchen or the housekeeper’s room or wherever they go. And the pig-man, I
happen to know, off having his dinner. The coast is clear. A thousand men could
steal a thousand pigs from the piggeries of Blandings Castle at two o’clock in
the afternoon, and defy detection.’

Ricky
was impressed. This was unquestionably G H Q stuff.

‘Throughout
the afternoon,’ continued the Duke, ‘the pig remains in the bathroom, and
continues to do so till nightfall. Then —’

‘But,
Uncle Alaric, somebody’s sure to go into the bathroom before that. House-maids
with clean towels….’

The
Duke swelled belligerently.

‘I’d
like to see anybody go into my bathroom, after I’ve issued orders that they’re
not to. I shall stay in my room all through the day, refusing admittance to one
and all. I shall have my dinner there on a tray. And if any dashed housemaid
thinks she’s going to muscle in with clean towels, she’ll soon find herself
sent off with a flea in her ear. And during dinner you will return. You will
have a car waiting here’ — he prodded the sketch map with a large thumb — ‘where
the road curves along the bushes at the end of the lawn. You will remove the
pig, place it in the car and drive it to my house in Wiltshire. That is the
plan I have evolved. Is there anything about it you don’t understand?’

‘Not a
thing, Uncle Alaric!’

‘And
you think you can do it?’

‘On my
head, Uncle Alaric. It’s in the bag. And may I say, Uncle Alaric, that I don’t
believe there’s another man in England who could have thought all that out as
you have done. It’s genius.’

‘Would
you call it that?’

‘I
certainly would.’

‘Perhaps
you’re right.’

‘I know
I’m right. It’s the most extraordinary exhibition of sheer ice-cold brainwork
that I’ve ever encountered. What did you do in the Great War, Uncle Alaric?’

‘Oh,
this and that. Work of national importance, you know.’

‘I
mean, they didn’t put you on the Staff?’

‘Oh,
no. Nothing of that sort.’

‘What
waste! What criminal waste! Thank God we had a Navy.’

The
most delightful atmosphere now prevailed in the lounge of the Emsworth Arms.

The
Duke said it was extremely kind of Ricky to be so flattering. Ricky said that ‘flattering’
was surely hardly the word, for he had merely given a frank opinion which would
have been the opinion of anybody who recognized genius when they came across
it. The Duke said would Ricky have a drink? Ricky, thanking him profusely, said
it was a bit early. The Duke asked Ricky if he had been writing anything
lately. Ricky said not just lately, but he had a sonnet coming out in the
Poetry
Review
next month. Dashed interesting things, sonnets, said the Duke, and
asked if Ricky had regular hours for sitting at his desk or did he wait for an
inspiration. Ricky said he found the policy that suited him best was to lurk
quietly till an idea came along and then jump out and land on the back of its
neck with both feet. The Duke said that if somebody offered him a million
pounds he himself would be incapable of writing a sonnet. Ricky said Oh, it was
just a knack — not to be compared with work that took real, hard thinking, and
gave as an instance of such work the planning out of campaigns for stealing
pigs. To do that said Ricky, a fellow really had to have something.

There
was, in fact, only one word to describe what was in progress in that dim lounge
— the word ‘Lovefeast’. And it was a thousand pities, therefore, that Ricky
should have proceeded, as he now did, to destroy the harmony.

Poets,
as a class, are business men. Shakespeare describes the poet’s eye as rolling
in a fine frenzy from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven, and giving to airy
nothing a local habitation and a name, but in practice you will find that one
corner of that eye is generally glued on the royalty returns. Ricky was no
exception. Like all poets, he had his times of dreaminess, but an editor who
sent him a cheque for a pound instead of the guinea which had been agreed upon
as the price of his latest
morceau
was very little older before he found
a sharp letter on his desk or felt his ear burning at what was coming over the
telephone wire. And now, having accepted this commission and discussed it in
broad outline, he was anxious to get the terms settled.

‘By the
way, Uncle Alaric,’ he said.

‘Hey?’
said the Duke, who had been interrupted in what promised to be rather a long
story about a man he had known in South Africa who had once written a limerick.

Ricky,
though feeling that this sort of negotiation would have been better placed in
the hands of one’s agent, was resolute.

‘There’s
just one small point,’ he said. ‘Would you rather give me your cheque before I
do the job, or after?’

The
cosy glow which had been enveloping the Duke became shot through by a sudden
chill. It was as if he had been luxuriating in a warm shower-bath, and some
hidden hand had turned on the cold tap.

‘My
cheque? What do you mean, my cheque?’

‘For
two hundred and fifty pounds.’

The
Duke shot back in his chair, and his moustache, foaming upwards as if a gale
had struck it, broke like a wave on the stern and rockbound coast of the
Dunstable nose. A lesser moustache, under the impact of that quick, agonized
expulsion of breath, would have worked loose at the roots. His recent high
opinion of his nephew had undergone a sharp revision. Though there were many
points on which their souls would not have touched, he was at one with Mr Pott
in his dislike of parting with money. Only a man of very exceptional charm
could have retained his esteem after asking him for two hundred and fifty
pounds.

‘What
the devil are you talking about?’ he cried. Ricky was looking anxious, like one
vis-à-vis
with a tiger and not any too sure that the bars of the cage
are to be depended on, but he continued resolute.

‘I am
taking it for granted that you will now let me have the money to buy that onion
soup bar. You remember we discussed it in London a few days ago. At that time
five hundred was the price, but the man has since come down to two hundred and
fifty, provided the cash is in his hands by the end of the week. The most
convenient thing for me, of course, would be if you would write out a cheque
now. Then I could mail it to him this morning and he would get it first thing
tomorrow. Still, suit yourself about that. Just so long as I get the money by
Friday —’

‘I
never heard anything so dashed absurd in my life!’

‘You
mean you won’t give me two hundred and fifty pounds?’

‘Of
course I mean I won’t give you two hundred and fifty pounds,’ said the Duke,
recovering his moustache and starting to chew it. ‘Gah!’ he said, summing up.

The
lovefeast was over.

A tense
silence fell upon the lounge of the Emsworth Arms.

‘I
thought I had heard the last of that silly nonsense,’ said the Duke, breaking
it. ‘What on earth do you want with an onion soup bar?’

It was
perhaps the memory of how close they had been to one another only a few brief
minutes back — two of the boys kidding back and forth about the Sonnet
question, as you might say — that decided Ricky to be frank with his uncle. He
was conscious as he spoke that frankness is a quality that can be overdone and
one which in the present case might lead to disagreeable consequences, but some
powerful argument had to be produced if there was to be a change for the better
in the other’s attitude. And there was just a chance — Mr Pott in his Silver
Ring days would probably have estimated it at 100—8 —that what he was about to
say would touch the man’s heart. After all, the toughest specimens were
sometimes melted by a tale of true love.

‘I want
to get married,’ he said.

If the
Duke’s heart was touched, his rugged exterior showed no sign of it. His eyes
came out of his head like a prawn’s, and once more his moustache foamed up
against his breakwater of a nose.

‘Married?’
he cried. ‘What do you mean, married? Don’t be an ass.’

Ricky
had started the day with a tenderness towards all created things, and this
attitude he had hoped to be able to maintain. But he could not help feeling
that Providence, in creating his Uncle Alaric, was trying him a little high.

‘I
never heard such nonsense in my life. How the devil can you afford to get
married? You’ve got about twopence a year which your mother left you, and I don’t
suppose you make enough out of those sonnets of yours to keep you in
cigarettes.’

‘That’s
why I want to buy this onion soup bar.’

‘And a
nice fool you would look, selling onion soup.’

With a
strong effort, Ricky succeeded in making no comment on this. It seemed to him
that silence was best. Galling though it was to allow his companion to score
debating points, it was better than to close all avenues leading to an
appeasement with a blistering repartee. At the moment, moreover, he could not
think of a blistering repartee.

The
Duke’s moustache was rising and falling like seaweed on an ebb tide.

‘And a nice
fool I’d look, going about trying to explain away a nephew who dished soup out
of a tureen. It’s been bad enough having to tell my friends you write poetry. “What’s
that nephew of yours doing these days?”‘ the Duke proceeded, giving an
imitation of an enquiring friend with — for some reason — a falsetto voice. ‘“The
Guards? Diplomatic Service? Reading for the Bar?” “No,” I tell them. “He’s
writing poetry,” and there’s an awkward silence. And now you want me to have to
spread it about that you’ve become a blasted soup-dispenser. Gah!’

A deep
flush had spread itself over Ricky’s face. His temper, always a little inclined
to be up and doing, had begun to flex its muscles like an acrobat about to do a
trick.

‘As for
this idea of yours of getting married …. Why do you want to get married? Hey?
Why?’

‘Oh,
just to score off the girl. I dislike her.’

‘What!’

‘Why do
you think I want to get married? Why do people usually want to get married? I
want to get married because I’ve found the most wonderful girl in the world,
and I love her.’

‘You
said you disliked her.’

‘I was
merely trying to be funny.’

The
Duke took in a mouthful of moustache, chewed it for a moment, seemed
dissatisfied with the flavour and expelled it again with another forceful puff.

‘Who is
she?’

‘Nobody
you know.’

‘Well,
who’s her father?’

‘Oh,
nobody special.’

A
sudden, sinister calm fell upon the Duke, causing his manner to resemble that
of a volcano which is holding itself in by sheer will-power.

‘You
don’t need to tell me any more. I see it all. The wench is a dashed outsider.’

‘She is
not!’

‘Don’t
argue with me. Well, that settles it. Not a penny do you get from me.’

‘All
right. And not a pig do you get from me.’

‘Hey?’

The
Duke was taken aback. It was seldom that he found himself in the position of
having to deal with open mutiny in the ranks. Indeed, the experience had never
happened to him before, and for an instant he was at a loss. Then he recovered
himself, and the old imperious glare returned to his bulging eyes.