Young Men in Spats (21 page)

‘Yesterday, Claude and I arrived in London from our Bexhill home to give Julia a pleasant surprise. We stayed, naturally, in the boarding-house where she has been living for the past six weeks. And what do you think we discovered?'

‘Insects.'

‘Not insects. A letter. From a young man. I found to my horror that a young man of whom I knew nothing was arranging to marry my daughter. I sent for him immediately, and found him to be quite impossible. He jellies eels!'

‘Does what?'

‘He is an assistant at a jellied eel shop.'

‘But surely,' said Lord Ickenham, ‘that speaks well for him. The capacity to jelly an eel seems to me to argue intelligence of a high order. It isn't everybody who can do it, by any means. I know if someone came to me and said, “Jelly this eel!” I should be nonplussed. And so, or I am very much mistaken, would Ramsay MacDonald and Winston Churchill.'

The woman did not seem to see eye to eye.

‘Tchah!' she said. ‘What do you suppose my husband's brother Charlie Parker would say if I allowed his niece to marry a man who jellies eels?'

‘Ah!' said Claude, who, before we go any further, was a tall, drooping bird with a red soup-strainer moustache.

‘Or my husband's brother, Henry Parker.'

‘Ah!' said Claude. ‘Or Cousin Alf Robbins, for that matter.'

‘Exactly. Cousin Alfred would die of shame.'

The girl Julia hiccoughed passionately, so much so that Pongo says it was all he could do to stop himself nipping across and taking her hand in his and patting it.

‘I've told you a hundred times, Mother, that Wilberforce is only jellying eels till he finds something better.'

‘What is better than an eel?' asked Lord Ickenham, who had been following this discussion with the close attention it deserved. ‘For jellying purposes, I mean.'

‘He is ambitious. It won't be long,' said the girl, ‘before Wilberforce suddenly rises in the world.'

She never spoke a truer word. At this very moment, up he came from behind the settee like a leaping salmon.

‘Julia!' he cried.

‘Wilby!' yipped the girl.

And Pongo says he never saw anything more sickening in his life than the way she flung herself into the blighter's arms and clung there like the ivy on the old garden wall. It wasn't that he had anything specific against the pink chap, but this girl had made a deep impression on him and he resented her glueing herself to another in this manner.

Julia's mother, after just that brief moment which a woman needs in which to recover from her natural surprise at seeing eel-jelliers pop up from behind sofas, got moving and plucked her away like a referee breaking a couple of welter-weights.

‘Julia Parker,' she said, ‘I'm ashamed of you!'

‘So am I,' said Claude.

‘I blush for you.'

‘Me, too,' said Claude. ‘Hugging and kissing a man who called your father a perishing old bottle-nosed Gawd-help-us.'

‘I think,' said Lord Ickenham, shoving his oar in, ‘that before proceeding any further we ought to go into that point. If he called you a perishing old bottle-nosed Gawd-help-us, it seems to me that the first thing to do is to decide whether he was right, and frankly, in my opinion . . .'

‘Wilberforce will apologize.'

‘Certainly I'll apologize. It isn't fair to hold a remark passed in the heat of the moment against a chap . . .'

‘Mr Robinson,' said the woman, ‘you know perfectly well that whatever remarks you may have seen fit to pass don't matter one way or the other. If you were listening to what I was saying you will understand . . .'

‘Oh, I know, I know. Uncle Charlie Parker and Uncle Henry Parker and Cousin Alf Robbins and all that. Pack of snobs!'

‘What!'

‘Haughty, stuck-up snobs. Them and their class distinction. Think themselves everybody just because they've got money. I'd like to know how they got it.'

‘What do you mean by that?'

‘Never mind what I mean.'

‘If you are insinuating—'

‘Well, of course, you know, Connie,' said Lord Ickenham mildly, ‘he's quite right. You can't get away from that.'

I don't know if you have ever seen a bull-terrier embarking on a scrap with an Airedale and just as it was getting down nicely to its work suddenly having an unexpected Kerry Blue sneak up behind it and bite it in the rear quarters. When this happens, it lets go of the Airedale and swivels round and fixes the butting-in animal with a pretty nasty eye. It was exactly the same with the woman Connie when Lord Ickenham spoke these words.

‘What!'

‘I was only wondering if you had forgotten how Charlie Parker made his pile.'

‘What are you talking about?'

‘I know it is painful,' said Lord Ickenham, ‘and one doesn't mention it as a rule, but, as we are on the subject, you must admit that lending money at two hundred and fifty per cent interest is not done in the best circles. The judge, if you remember, said so at the trial.'

‘I never knew that!' cried the girl Julia.

‘Ah,' said Lord Ickenham. ‘You kept it from the child? Quite right, quite right.'

‘It's a lie!'

‘And when Henry Parker had all that fuss with the bank it was touch and go they didn't send him to prison. Between ourselves, Connie, has a bank official, even a brother of your husband, any right to sneak fifty pounds from the till in order to put it on a hundred to one shot for the Grand National? Not quite playing the game, Connie. Not the straight bat. Henry, I grant you, won five thousand of the best and never looked back afterwards, but, though we applaud his judgment of form, we must surely look askance at his financial methods. As for Cousin Alf Robbins . . .'

The woman was making rummy stuttering sounds. Pongo tells me he once had a Pommery Seven which used to express itself in much the same way if you tried to get it to take a hill on high. A sort of mixture of gurgles and explosions.

‘There is not a word of truth in this,' she gasped at length, having managed to get the vocal cords disentangled. ‘Not a single word. I think you must have gone mad.'

Lord Ickenham shrugged his shoulders.

‘Have it your own way, Connie. I was only going to say that, while the jury were probably compelled on the evidence submitted to them to give Cousin Alf Robbins the benefit of the doubt when charged with smuggling dope, everybody knew that
he had been doing it for years. I am not blaming him, mind you. If a man can smuggle cocaine and get away with it, good luck to him, say I. The only point I am trying to make is that we are hardly a family that can afford to put on dog and sneer at honest suitors for our daughters' hands. Speaking for myself, I consider that we are very lucky to have the chance of marrying even into eel-jellying circles.'

‘So do I,' said Julia firmly.

‘You don't believe what this man is saying?'

‘I believe every word.'

‘So do I,' said the pink chap.

The woman snorted. She seemed overwrought.

‘Well,' she said, ‘goodness knows I have never liked Laura, but I would never have wished her a husband like you!'

‘Husband?' said Lord Ickenham, puzzled. ‘What gives you the impression that Laura and I are married?'

There was a weighty silence, during which the parrot threw out a general invitation to join it in a nut. Then the girl Julia spoke.

‘You'll have to let me marry Wilberforce now,' she said. ‘He knows too much about us.'

‘I was rather thinking that myself,' said Lord Ickenham. ‘Seal his lips, I say.'

‘You wouldn't mind marrying into a low family, would you, darling?' asked the girl, with a touch of anxiety.

‘No family could be too low for me, dearest, if it was yours,' said the pink chap.

‘After all, we needn't see them.'

‘That's right.'

‘It isn't one's relations that matter: it's oneselves.'

‘That's right, too.'

‘Wilby!'

‘Julia!'

They repeated the old ivy on the garden wall act. Pongo says he didn't like it any better than the first time, but his distaste wasn't in it with the woman Connie's.

‘And what, may I ask,' she said, ‘do you propose to marry on?'

This seemed to cast a damper. They came apart. They looked at each other. The girl looked at the pink chap, and the pink chap looked at the girl. You could see that a jarring note had been struck.

‘Wilberforce is going to be a very rich man some day.'

‘Some day!'

‘If I had a hundred pounds,' said the pink chap, ‘I could buy a half-share in one of the best milk walks in South London tomorrow.'

‘If!' said the woman.

‘Ah!' said Claude.

‘Where are you going to get it?'

‘Ah!' said Claude.

‘Where,' repeated the woman, plainly pleased with the snappy crack and loath to let it ride without an encore, ‘are you going to get it?'

‘That,' said Claude, ‘is the point. Where are you going to get a hundred pounds?'

‘Why, bless my soul,' said Lord Ickenham jovially, ‘from me, of course. Where else?'

And before Pongo's bulging eyes he fished out from the recesses of his costume a crackling bundle of notes and handed it over. And the agony of realizing that the old bounder had had all that stuff on him all this time and that he hadn't touched him
for so much as a tithe of it was so keen, Pongo says, that before he knew what he was doing he had let out a sharp, whinnying cry which rang through the room like the yowl of a stepped-on puppy.

‘Ah,' said Lord Ickenham. ‘The vet wishes to speak to me. Yes, vet?'

This seemed to puzzle the cerise bloke a bit.

‘I thought you said this chap was your son.'

‘If I had a son,' said Lord Ickenham, a little hurt, ‘he would be a good deal better-looking than that. No, this is the local veterinary surgeon. I may have said I
looked
on him as a son. Perhaps that was what confused you.'

He shifted across to Pongo and twiddled his hands enquiringly. Pongo gaped at him, and it was not until one of the hands caught him smartly in the lower ribs that he remembered he was deaf and started to twiddle back. Considering that he wasn't supposed to be dumb, I can't see why he should have twiddled, but no doubt there are moments when twiddling is about all a fellow feels himself equal to. For what seemed to him at least ten hours Pongo had been undergoing great mental stress, and one can't blame him for not being chatty. Anyway, be that as it may, he twiddled.

‘I cannot quite understand what he says,' announced Lord Ickenham at length, ‘because he sprained a finger this morning and that makes him stammer. But I gather that he wishes to have a word with me in private. Possibly my parrot has got something the matter with it which he is reluctant to mention even in sign language in front of a young unmarried girl. You know what parrots are. We will step outside.'

‘
We
will step outside,' said Wilberforce.

‘Yes,' said the girl Julia. ‘I feel like a walk.'

‘And you,' said Lord Ickenham to the woman Connie, who was looking like a female Napoleon at Moscow. ‘Do you join the hikers?'

‘I shall remain and make myself a cup of tea. You will not grudge us a cup of tea, I hope?'

‘Far from it,' said Lord Ickenham cordially. ‘This is Liberty Hall. Stick around and mop it up till your eyes bubble.'

Outside, the girl, looking more like a dewy rosebud than ever, fawned on the old buster pretty considerably.

‘I don't know how to thank you!' she said. And the pink chap said he didn't, either.

‘Not at all, my dear, not at all,' said Lord Ickenham.

‘I think you're simply wonderful.'

‘No, no.'

‘You are. Perfectly marvellous.'

‘Tut, tut,' said Lord Ickenham. ‘Don't give the matter another thought.'

He kissed her on both cheeks, the chin, the forehead, the right eyebrow, and the tip of the nose, Pongo looking on the while in a baffled and discontented manner. Everybody seemed to be kissing this girl except him.

Eventually the degrading spectacle ceased and the girl and the pink chap shoved off, and Pongo was enabled to take up the matter of that hundred quid.

‘Where,' he asked, ‘did you get all that money?'

‘Now, where did I?' mused Lord Ickenham. ‘I know your aunt gave it to me for some purpose. But what? To pay some bill or other, I rather fancy.'

This cheered Pongo up slightly.

‘She'll give you the devil when you get back,' he said, with not
a little relish. ‘I wouldn't be in your shoes for something. When you tell Aunt Jane,' he said, with confidence, for he knew his Aunt Jane's emotional nature, ‘that you slipped her entire roll to a girl, and explain, as you will have to explain, that she was an extraordinarily pretty girl – a girl, in fine, who looked like something out of a beauty chorus of the better sort, I should think she would pluck down one of the ancestral battle-axes from the wall and jolly well strike you on the mazzard.'

‘Have no anxiety, my dear boy,' said Lord Ickenham. ‘It is like your kind heart to be so concerned, but have no anxiety. I shall tell her that I was compelled to give the money to you to enable you to buy back some compromising letters from a Spanish
demi-mondaine.
She will scarcely be able to blame me for rescuing a fondly-loved nephew from the clutches of an adventuress. It may be that she will feel a little vexed with you for a while, and that you may have to allow a certain time to elapse before you visit Ickenham again, but then I shan't be wanting you at Ickenham till the ratting season starts, so all is well.'

At this moment, there came toddling up to the gate of The Cedars a large red-faced man. He was just going in when Lord Ickenham hailed him.