Uncle Fred in the Springtime (8 page)

‘I saw
no lurking figure.’

‘He
said he was going to look in today and break my neck.’

‘I didn’t
know poets broke people’s necks.’

‘Ricky
does. He once took on three simultaneous costermongers in Covent Garden and
cleaned them up in five minutes. He had gone there to get inspiration for a
pastoral, and they started chi-iking him, and he sailed in and knocked them
base over apex into a pile of Brussels sprouts.’

‘How
different from the home life of the late Lord Tennyson. But you were telling us
about this trouble at the Ball.’

Horace
mused for a moment, his thoughts in the stormy past.

‘Well,
it was after the proceedings had been in progress for about a couple of hours
that it started. Polly was off somewhere, hobnobbing with pals, and I was
having a smoke and resting the ankles, when Ricky appeared and came up and
joined me. He said a friend of his had given him a ticket at the last moment
and he thought he might as well look in for a bit, so he hired a Little Lord
Fauntleroy suit and came along. He was perfectly all right then — in fact,
exceptionally affable. He sat down and tried to borrow five hundred pounds from
me to buy an onion soup bar.’

Lord
Ickenham shook his head.

‘You
are taking me out of my depth. We rustics who don’t get up to London much are
not in touch with the latest developments of modern civilization. What is an
onion soup bar?’

‘Place
where you sell onion soup,’ explained Pongo. ‘There are lots of them round
Piccadilly Circus way these days. You stay open all night and sell onion soup
to the multitude as they reel out of the bottle-party places. Pots of money in
it, I believe.’

‘So
Ricky said. A pal of his, an American, started one a couple of years ago in
Coventry Street and, according to him, worked the profits up to about two
thousand quid a year. But apparently he has got homesick and wants to sell our
and go back to New York, and he’s willing to let Ricky have the thing for five
hundred. And Ricky wanted me to lend it to him. And he was just getting rather
eloquent and convincing, when he suddenly broke off and I saw that he was
glaring at something over my shoulder.’

‘Don’t
tell me,’ said Lord Ickenham. ‘Let me guess. Polly?’

‘In
person. And then the whole aspect of affairs changed. He had just been stroking
my arm and saying what pals we had always been and asking me if I remembered
the days when we used to go ratting together at my father’s place, and he
cheesed it like a flash. He turned vermilion, and the next moment he had
started kicking up a frightful row … cursing me … cursing Polly … showing
quite a different side to his nature, I mean to say. Well, you know how it is
when you do that sort of thing at a place like the Albert Hall. People began to
cluster round, asking questions. And what with one thing and another, I got a
bit rattled, and I suppose it was because I was rattled that I did it. It was a
mistake, of course. I see that now.’

‘Did
what?’

‘Jabbed
him with my assegai. Mind you,’ said Horace, ‘I didn’t mean to. It wasn’t as if
I had had any settled plans. I was just trying to hold him off. But I misjudged
the distance, and the next thing I knew he was rubbing his stomach and coming
for me with a nasty glint in his eyes. So I jabbed him again, and then things
hotted up still further. And what really led to my getting arrested was that he
managed to edge past the assegai and land me a juicy one on the jaw.’

Lord
Ickenham found himself unable to reconcile cause and effect.

‘But
surely no policeman, however flat-footed, would take a man into custody for
being landed a juicy one on the jaw. You have probably got your facts twisted.
I expect we shall find, when we look into it, that it was Ricky who was taken
to Marlborough Street.’

‘No,
you see what happened was this juicy one on the jaw made me a bit dizzy, and I
didn’t quite know what I was doing. Everything was a sort of blur, and I just
jabbed wildly in the general direction of what I thought was the seat of the
trouble. And after a while I discovered that I was jabbing a female dressed as
Marie Antoinette. It came as a great surprise to me. As a matter of fact, I had
been rather puzzled for some moments. You see, I could feel the assegai going
into some yielding substance, and I was surprised that Ricky was so squashy and
had such a high voice. And then, as I say, I found it wasn’t Ricky, but this
woman.’

‘Embarrassing.’

‘It was
a bit. The man who was with the woman summoned the cops. And what made it still
more awkward was that by that time Ricky was nowhere near. Almost at the start
of the proceedings, it appeared, people had gripped him and bustled him off. So
that when the policeman arrived and found me running amuck with an assegai
apparently without provocation, it was rather difficult to convince him that I
wasn’t tight. In fact, I didn’t convince him. The magistrate was a bit terse
about it all this morning. I say, are you sure Ricky wasn’t hanging about
outside?’

‘We saw
no signs of him.’

‘Then I’ll
get dressed and go round and see Polly.’

‘With
what motive?’

‘Well,
dash it, I want to tell her to go and explain to Ricky that my behaviour
towards her throughout was scrupulously correct. At present, he’s got the idea
that I’m a kind of …. Who was the chap who was such a devil with the other
sex? … Donald something.’

‘Donald
Duck?’

‘Don
Juan. That’s the fellow I mean. Unless I can convince Ricky immediately that Pm
not a Don Juan and was not up to any funny business with Polly, the worst will
happen. You’ve no notion what he was like last night. Absolutely frothing at
the mouth. I must go and see her at once.’

‘And if
he comes in while you are there?’ Horace, half-way to the door, halted.

‘I
never thought of that.’

‘No.’

‘You
think it would be better to telephone her?’

‘I don’t
think anything of the sort. You can’t conduct a delicate negotiation like this
over the telephone. You need the language of the eye … those little appealing
gestures of the hand … Obviously you must entrust the thing to an ambassador.
And what better ambassador could you have than Pongo here?’

‘Pongo?’

‘A
silver-tongued orator, if ever there was one. Oh, I know what you are thinking,’
said Lord Ickenham. ‘You feel that there may be a coolness on his side, due to
the fact that you recently refused to lend him a bit of money. My dear boy,
Pongo is too big and fine to be unwilling to help you out because of that.
Besides, in return for his services you will of course naturally slip him the trifle
he requires.’

‘But he
said he wanted two hundred pounds.’

‘Two
hundred and fifty. He doesn’t always speak distinctly.’

‘But
that’s a frightful lot.’

‘To a
man of your wealth as the price of your safety? You show a cheeseparing spirit
which I do nor like to see. Fight against it.’

‘But,
dash it, why does everybody come trying to touch
me?’

‘Because
you’ve got the stuff, my boy. It is the penalty you pay for having an
ancestress who couldn’t say No to Charles the Second.’

Horace
chewed a dubious lip.

‘I don’t
see how I can manage —’Well, please yourself, of course. Tell me about this
fellow Ricky, Pongo. A rather formidable chap, is he? Robust? Well developed?
Muscular? His strength is as the strength often?’

‘Definitely,
Uncle Fred.’

‘And in
addition to that he appears to be both jealous and quick-tempered. An
unpleasant combination. One of those men, I imagine, who if he inflicted some
serious injury on anyone, would be the first to regret it after he had calmed
down, but would calm down about ten minutes too late. I’ve met the type. There
was a chap named Bricky Bostock in my young days who laid a fellow out for
weeks over some misunderstanding about a girl, and it was pitiful to see his
remorse when he realized what he had done. Used to hang about outside the
hospital all the time the man was in danger, trembling like a leaf. But, as I
said to him, “What’s the use of trembling like a leaf now? The time to have
trembled like a leaf was when you had your hands on his throat and were
starting to squeeze the juice out of him.”‘

‘It’ll
be all right about that two-fifty, Pongo,’ said Horace.

‘Thanks,
old man.’

‘When
can you go and see Polly?’

‘The
instant I’ve had a bit of lunch.’

‘I’ll
give you her address. You will find her a most intelligent girl, quick to understand.
But pitch it strong.’

‘Leave
it to me.’

‘And
impress upon her particularly that there is no time to waste. Full explanations
should be made to Ricky by this evening at the latest. And now,’ said Horace, ‘I
suppose I’d better go and dress.’

The door
closed. Lord Ickenham glanced at his watch.

‘Hullo,’
he said. ‘I must be off. I have to go to the Senior Conservative Club to meet
old Emsworth. So goodbye, my dear boy, for the present. I am delighted that
everything has come out so smoothly. We shall probably meet at Port’s. I am
going to slip round there after lunch and see Polly. Give her my love, and don’t
let Mustard lure you into any card game. A dear, good chap, one of the best,
but rather apt tons try to get people tons play something he calls Persian
Monarchs. When he was running that club of his, I’ve known him to go through
the place like a devouring flame, leaving ruin and desolation behind him on
every side.’

6

The method of Lord
Emsworth, when telling a story, being to repeat all the unimportant parts
several times and to diverge from the main stream of narrative at intervals in
order to supply lengthy character studies of the various persons involved in
it, luncheon was almost over before he was able to place his guest in full possession
of the facts relating to the Empress of Blandings. When eventually he had
succeeded in doing so, he adjusted his pince-nez and looked hopefully across
the table.

‘What
dons you advise, my dear Ickenham?’

Lord
Ickenham ate a thoughtful cheese straw.

‘Well,
it is obvious that immediate steps must be taken through the proper channels,
but the question that presents itself is “What steps?”‘

‘Exactly.’

‘We
have here,’ said Lord Ickenham, illustrating by means of a knife, a radish and
a piece of bread, ‘one pig, one sister, one Duke.’

‘Yes.’

‘The
Duke wants the pig.’

‘Quite.’

‘The
sister says he’s got to have it.’

‘Precisely.’

‘The
pig, no doubt, would prefer to be dissociated from the affair altogether. Very
well, then. To what conclusion do we come?’

‘I don’t
know,’ said Lord Emsworth.

‘We
come to the conclusion that the whole situation pivots on the pig. Eliminate
the pig, and we see daylight. “What, no pig?” says the Duke, and after a little
natural disappointment turns his thoughts to other things — I don’t know what,
but whatever things Dukes do turn their thoughts to. There must be dozens. This
leaves us with the simple problem — How is the existing state of what I might
call “plus pig” to be converted into a state of “minus pig”? There can be only
one answer, my dear Emsworth. The pig must be smuggled away to a place of
safety and kept under cover till the Duke has blown over.’

Lord
Emsworth, as always when confronted with a problem, had allowed his lower jaw
to sag restfully.

‘How?’
he asked.

Lord
Ickenham regarded him with approval.

‘I was
expecting you to say that. I knew your razor-like brain would cur cleanly to
the heart of the thing. Well, it ought not to be difficult. You creep out by
night with an accomplice and — one shoving and one pulling — you load the
animal into some vehicle and ship her off to my family seat, where she will be
looked after like a favourite child till you are ready to receive her again. It
is a long journey from Shropshire to Hampshire, of course, but she can stop off
from time to time for a strengthening bran-mash or a quick acorn. The only
point to be decided is who draws the job of accomplice. Who is there at
Blandings that you can trust?’

‘Nobody,’
said Lord Emsworth promptly.

‘Ah?
That seems to constitute an obstacle.’

‘I
suppose you would not care to come down yourself?’

‘I
should love it, and it is what I would have suggested. But unfortunately I am
under strict orders from my wife to remain at Ickenham. My wife, I should
mention, is a woman who believes in a strong centralized government.’

‘But
you aren’t at Ickenham.’

‘No.
The Boss being away, I am playing hookey at the moment. But I have often heard
her mention her friend Lady Constance Keeble, and were I to come to Blandings
Lady Constance would inevitably reveal the fact to her sooner or later. Some
casual remark in a letter, perhaps, saying how delightful it had been to meet
her old bit of trouble at last and how my visit had brightened up the place.
You see what I mean?’