Uncle Fred in the Springtime Page 11

  ‘Brave lad!’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I said, “Brave lad!”‘

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Why not?’ argued Lord Ickenham.

  The Duke turned this over for a moment, and seemed to see justice in it.

  ‘What had happened, you see, was that Horace had mistaken him for a friend of his. Well, all right. Nothing so very remarkable about that, you are saying. Sort of thing that might happen to anyone. Quite. But mark the sequel. If Burns thought “Loch Lomond” rhymes with “before ye”,’ said the Duke, with a return of his peevishness, ‘he must have been a borderline case.’

  ‘And the sequel, you were about to say?’

  ‘Eh? Oh, the sequel. I’m coming to that. Not that there are many rhymes to “Loch Lomond”. Got to be fair to the chap, I suppose. Yes, the sequel. Well, right on top of this, Connie comes back with your daughter. She’s charming.’

  ‘I have not met Lady Constance.’

  ‘Your daughter, I mean.’

  ‘Oh, very. Her name is Gwendoline.’

  ‘So she told us. But that didn’t stop Horace from going up to her and calling her Polly.’

  ‘Polly?’

  ‘Polly. “Why, hullo, Polly!” were his exact words.’

  Lord Ickenham reflected.

  ‘The conclusion that suggests itself is that he had mistaken her for a girl called Polly.’

  ‘Exactly. The very thought that flashed on me. Well, you can imagine that that made me realize that matters were grave. One bloomer of that sort — yes. But when it happens twice in two minutes, you begin to fear the worst. I’ve always been uneasy about Horace’s mental condition, ever since he had measles as a boy and suddenly shot up to the height of about eight foot six. It stands to reason a chap’s brain can’t be all that way from his heart and still function normally. Look at the distance the blood’s got to travel. Well, here we are,’ said the Duke, as they passed through the great front door that stood hospitably open. ‘Hullo, where’s everybody? Dressing, I suppose. You’ll be wanting to go to your room. I’ll take you there. You’re in the Red Room. The bathroom’s at the end of the passage. What was I saying? Oh, yes. I said I began to fear the worst. I reasoned the whole thing out. A chap can’t be eight foot six and the son of my late brother and expect to carry on as if nothing had happened. Something’s bound to give. I remembered what he had told me about thinking he had seen Baxter at the Ball, and it suddenly struck me like a blow that he must have developed — I don’t know what you call it, but I suppose there’s some scientific term for it when a feller starts seeing things.’

  ‘You mean a sublunary medulla oblongata diathesis.’

  ‘Very possibly. I can see now why that girl broke off the engagement. She must have realized that he had got this — whatever it was you said, and decided it wasn’t good enough. No girl wants a potty husband, though it’s dashed hard not to get one nowadays. Here’s your room. I wish you would see what you can do for the boy. Can’t you examine him or something?’

  ‘I shall be delighted to examine him. Just give me time to have a bath, and I will be at his disposal.’

  ‘Then I’ll send him to you. If there’s anything to be done for him, I’d be glad if you would do it. What with him and Bosham and Emsworth and that whistling feller, I feel as if I were living in a private asylum, and I don’t like it.’

  The Duke stumped off, and Lord Ickenham, armed with his great sponge Joyeuse, made his way to the bathroom. He had just got back from a refreshing dip, when there was a knock at the door and Horace entered. And, having done so, he stood staring dumbly.

  Horace Davenport’s face had two features that called for attention. From his father he had inherited the spacious Dunstable nose; from his mother, a Hilsbury-Hepworth, the large, fawnlike eyes which distinguish that family. This nose, as he gazed at Lord Ickenham, was twitching like a rabbit’s, and in the eyes behind their tortoiseshell-rimmed spectacles there was dawning slowly a look of incredulous horror. It was as if he had been cast for the part of Macbeth and was starting to run through the Banquo’s ghost scene.

  The events of the evening had come as a great shock to Horace. Firmly convinced for some time past that his Uncle Alaric was one of England’s outstanding schizophrenic cases, a naturally nervous disposition had led him to look on the latter’s mental condition as something which might at any moment spread to himself, like a cold in the head. The double hallucination which he had so recently experienced, coming on top of the delusion he had had about seeing Baxter at the Ball, had rendered him apprehensive in the last degree, and he had welcomed the suggestion that he should get together with Sir Roderick Glossop for a quiet talk.

  And now, so all his senses told him, he was suffering yet another hallucination. In the bath-robed figure before him, he could have sworn that he was gazing at his late fiancée’s uncle, the Earl of Ickenham.

  Yet this was the Red Room, and in the Red Room he had been specifically informed, Sir Roderick Glossop was to be found. Moreover, in the other’s demeanour there was no suggestion of recognition, merely a courteous air of mild enquiry.

  After what seemed an age-long pause, he managed to speak.

  ‘Sir Roderick Glossop?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Er — my name’s Davenport.’

  ‘Of course, yes. Come in, my dear fellow. You won’t mind if I dress while we are talking? I haven’t left myself too much time.’

  Horace watched him with a dazed eye as he dived with boyish animation into a studded shirt. The grey head, popping out a moment later at shirt’s end, gave him a renewed sense of shock, so intensely Ickenhamian was it in every respect.

  A sudden feeble hope came to him that this time there might be a simple explanation. It might prove to be one of those cases of extraordinary physical resemblance of which you read in the papers.

  ‘I — er — I say,’ he asked, ‘do you by any chance know a man named Lord Ickenham?’

  ‘Lord Ickenham?’ said Lord Ickenham, springing into dress trousers like a trained acrobat. ‘Yes. I’ve met him.’

  ‘You’re amazingly like him, aren’t you?’

  Lord Ickenham did not reply for a moment. He was tying his tie, and on these occasions the conscientious man anxious to give of his best at the dinner table rivets his attention on the task in hand. Presently the frown passed from his face, and he was his genial self again.

  ‘I’m afraid I missed that. You were saying —’

  ‘You and Lord Ickenham look exactly alike, don’t you?’

  His companion seemed surprised.

  ‘Well, that’s a thing nobody has ever said to me before. Considering that Lord Ickenham is tall and slender — while I am short and stout….’

  ‘Short?’

  ‘Quite short.’

  ‘And stout?’

  ‘Extremely stout.’

  A low gulp escaped Horace Davenport. It might have been the expiring gurgle of that feeble hope. The sound caused his companion to look at him sharply, and as he did so his manner changed.

  ‘You really must forgive me,’ he said. ‘I fear I missed the point of what you have been saying. Inexcusable of me, for your uncle gave me your case history. He told me how in the hall this evening you mistook my daughter and nephew for old acquaintances, and there was something about thinking that a man you saw at some Ball in London was his secretary Mr Baxter. Was that the first time this sort of thing happened?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I see. The delusion metabolis came on quite suddenly, as it so often does. Can you suggest anything that might account for it?’

  Horace hesitated. He shrank from putting his secret fears into words. ‘Well, I was wondering….’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Is loopiness hereditary?’

  ‘It can be, no doubt.’

  ‘Noses are.’

  ‘True.’

  ‘This beezer of mine has come down through the ages.’

  ‘Indeed?’r />
  ‘So what I was wondering was, if a chap’s got a dotty uncle, is he bound to catch it?’

  ‘I would not say it was inevitable. Still…. How dotty is your uncle?’

  ‘Quite fairly dotty.’

  ‘I see. Had your father any such structural weakness?’

  ‘No. No, he was all right. He collected Japanese prints,’ said Horace, with an afterthought.

  ‘He didn’t think he was a Japanese print?’

  ‘Oh, no. Rather not.’

  ‘Then that is all right. I feel sure that there need be no real anxiety. I am convinced that all that we are suffering from is some minor nervous lesion, brought about possibly by worry. Have we been worried lately?’

  The question seemed to affect Horace Davenport much as it might have affected Job. He stared at his companion as at one who does not know the half of it.

  ‘Have we!’

  ‘We have?’

  ‘You bet we have.’

  ‘Then what we need is a long sea voyage.’

  ‘But, dash it, we’re a rotten sailor. Would you mind awfully if we got a second opinion?’

  ‘By all means.’

  ‘The other chap might simply tell us to go to Bournemouth or somewhere.’

  ‘Bournemouth would be just as good. We came here in our car, did we not? Then directly after dinner I advise that we steal quietly off, without going through the strain of saying goodbye to anyone, and drive to London. Having reached London, we can pack anything that may be necessary and go to Bournemouth and stay there.’

  ‘And you think that that will put us right?’

  ‘Unquestionably.’

  ‘And one other point. Would there be any medical objection to just one good, stiff, energetic binge in London? You see,’ said Horace, with a touch of apology, ‘we do rather feel, what with one thing and another, as if we wanted taking out of ourself at the moment.’

  Lord Ickenham patted his shoulder.

  ‘My dear boy, it is what any member of my profession would advise. Do we by any chance know a beverage called May Queen? It’s full name is “Tomorrow’ll be all the year the maddest, merriest day, for I’m to be Queen of the May, mother, I’m to be Queen of the May.” A clumsy title, generally shortened for purposes of ordinary conversation. Its foundation is any good, dry champagne, to which is added liqueur brandy, armagnac, kummel, yellow chartreuse and old stout, to taste. It is a good many years since I tried it myself, but I can thoroughly recommend it to alleviate the deepest despondency. Ah!’ said Lord Ickenham, as a mellow booming rose from below. ‘Dinner. Let us be going down. We do not want to be late for the trough our first night at a house, do we? Creates a bad impression.’

  11

  It had been Lord Ickenham’s intention, directly dinner was over, to seek out his nephew Pongo with a view to giving him a bracing pep talk. But a lengthy conference with his hostess delayed him in the drawing-room, and it was only after the subject of the Duke had been thoroughly threshed out between them that he was able to tear himself away. He found the young man eventually in the billiard-room, practising solitary cannons.

  Pongo’s demeanour at dinner had been such as to cause concern to an uncle and a fellow-conspirator. Solomon in all his glory, arrayed for the banquet, could not have surpassed him in splendour, but there is no question that he would have looked happier. Pongo’s tie was right, and his shirt was right, and his socks were right, and the crease in his trousers was a genuine feast for the eye, but his resemblance to a fox with a pack of hounds and a bevy of the best people on its trail, which had been so noticeable all through the day, had become more pronounced than ever.

  It was the cheerful, stimulating note, accordingly, that Lord Ickenham now set himself to strike. This wilting object before him was patently in need of all the cheer and stimulation he could get.

  ‘Well, my young ray of sunshine,’ he said, ‘I can see by our expression that we are feeling that everything is going like a breeze. I hear you put it across Horace properly.’

  Pongo brightened momentarily, as a veteran of Agincourt might have done at the mention of the name of Crispian.

  ‘Yes, I put it across old H. all right.’

  ‘You did indeed. You appear to have conducted yourself with admirable sang-froid. I am proud of you.’

  ‘But what’s the use?’ said Pongo, subsiding into gloom once more. ‘It can’t last. Even a goop like Horace, though nonplussed for the moment, is bound to start figuring things out and arriving at the nub. Directly he sees you —’He has seen me.’

  ‘Oh, my gosh! What happened?’

  ‘We had a long and interesting conversation, and I am happy to be able to report that he is leaving immediately for Bournemouth, merely pausing in London on his way, like some butterfly alighting on a flower, in order to get pickled to the tonsils.’

  Pongo, listening attentively to the précis of recent events, seemed grudgingly pleased.

  ‘Well, that’s something, I suppose,’ he said. ‘Getting Horace out of the place is better than nothing.’

  His tone pained Lord Ickenham.

  ‘You appear still moody,’ he said reproachfully. ‘I had supposed that my narrative would have had you dancing about the room, clapping your little hands. Is it possible that you are still finding Lady Constance a source of anxiety?’

  ‘And that man Baxter.’

  Lord Ickenham waved a cue in airy scorn of his hostess and the spectacled secretary.

  ‘Why do you bother about Connie and Baxter? A gorilla could lick them both. What has she been doing to you?’

  ‘She hasn’t been doing anything, exactly. She’s been quite matey, as a matter of fact. But my informants were right. She is the sort of woman who makes you feel that, no matter how suave her manner for the nonce, she is at heart a twenty-minute egg and may start functioning at any moment.’

  Lord Ickenham nodded.

  ‘I know what you mean. I have noticed the same thing in volcanoes, and the head mistress of my first kindergarten was just like that. It is several years, of course, since I graduated from the old place, but I can remember her vividly. The sweet, placid face … the cooing voice.., but always, like some haunting strain in a piece of music, that underlying suggestion of the sudden whack over the knuckles with a ruler. Why did Baxter jar upon you?’

  ‘He kept asking me questions about my methods of work.’

  ‘Ah, the two secs getting together and swapping shop. I thought that might happen.’

  ‘Then I wish you had warned me. That bird gives me the creeps.’

  ‘He struck you as sinister, did he? I have felt the same thing myself. Our conversation on the platform left me not altogether satisfied in my mind about that young man. It seemed to me that during my explanations with reference to the poor fellow on the train who thought he was Sir Roderick Glossop I detected a certain dryness in his manner, a subtle something that suggested that, lacking our friend Bosham’s Norman blood, he was equally deficient in that simple faith which the poet ranks even more highly. If you ask me, my dear Pongo, Baxter suspects.’

  ‘Then I’m jolly well going to get out of this!’

  ‘Impossible. Have your forgotten that Polly has to fascinate the Duke and will be lost without you beside her to stimulate and encourage? Where’s your chivalry? A nice figure you would have cut at King Arthur’s Round Table.’

  He had found the talking point. Pongo said Yes, there was something in that. Lord Ickenham said he had known that Pongo would arrive at that conclusion, once he had really given his keen brain to the thing.

  ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘we have set our hands to the plough, and we cannot sheathe the sword. Besides, I shall require your help in snitching the pig. But I was forgetting. You are not abreast of that side of our activities, are you? Emsworth has a pig. The Duke wants it. Emsworth would like to defy him, but dare not, owing to that twist in the other’s character which leads him, when defied on any premises, to give those premises the works with a poker.
So, on my advice, he is resorting to strategy. I have promised him that we will remove the animal from its sty, and you will then drive it across country to Ickenham, where it can lie low till the danger is past.’

  It was not often that Pongo Twistleton disarranged his hair, once he had brushed it for the evening, but he did so now. Such was his emotion that he plunged both hands through those perfect waves.

  ‘Ha!’

  ‘I keep asking you not to say “Ha!” my boy.’

  ‘So that’s the latest, is it? I’m to become a blasted pig’s chauffeur, am I?’

  ‘A brilliant summing-up of the situation. Flaubert could not have put it better.’

  ‘I absolutely and definitely refuse to have anything to do with the bally scheme.’

  ‘That is your last word?’

  ‘Specifically.’

  ‘I see. Well, it’s a pity, for Emsworth would undoubtedly have rewarded you with a purse of gold. Noblesse would have obliged. He has the stuff in sackfuls, and this pig is the apple of his eye. And you could do with a purse of gold just now, could you not?’

  Pongo started. He had missed this angle of the situation.

  ‘Oh! I didn’t think of that.’

  ‘Start pondering on it now. And while you are doing so,’ said Lord Ickenham, ‘I will show you how billiards should be played. Watch this shot.’

  He had begun to bend over the table, a bright eye fixed on the object ball, when he glanced round. The door had opened, and he was aware of something like a death ray playing about his person.

  Rupert Baxter was there, staring at him through his spectacles.

  To most people at whom the efficient Baxter directed that silent, steely, spectacled stare of his there was wont to come a sudden malaise, a disposition to shuffle the feet and explore the conscience guiltily: and even those whose consciences were clear generally quailed a little. Lord Ickenham, however, continued undisturbed.

  ‘Ah, my dear Baxter. Looking for me?’

  ‘I should be glad if you could spare me a moment.’

  ‘Something you want to talk to me about?’