Uncle Fred in the Springtime Read online

  Between Horace Davenport and his cousin Alaric Gilpin there was nothing in the nature of a family resemblance. Each had inherited his physique from his father, and the father of Ricky Gilpin had been an outsize gentleman with a chest like an all-in-wrestler’s. This chest he had handed down to his son, together with enough muscle to have fitted out two sons. Looking at Ricky, you might be a little surprised that he wrote poetry, but you had no difficulty in understanding how he was able to clean up costermongers in Covent Garden.

  But though externally as intimidating as ever and continuing to give the impression of being a young man with whom no prudent person would walk down a dark alley, Ricky Gilpin on this April morning was feeling a sort of universal benevolence towards all created things. A child could have played with him, and the cat attached to the Emsworth Arms had actually done so. Outwardly tough, inwardly he was a Cheeryble Brother.

  There is nothing that so braces a young man in love as a statement on the part of the girl of his dreams, after events have occurred which have made him think her ardour has begun to cool, that he is the only man for her, and that though she may have attended dances in the company of Zulu warriors the latter are to be looked on as the mere playthings of an idle hour. Polly Pott’s assurance after that scene at the Bohemian Ball that Horace Davenport was a purely negligible factor in her life had affected Ricky profoundly. And on top of that had come his uncle’s telegram.

  That telegram, he considered, could mean only one thing. He was about to be afforded the opportunity of placing him under an obligation — of putting him in a position, in short, where he could scarcely fail to do the decent thing in return. The Duke’s attitude in the matter of sympathy and support for that onion soup project would, he felt, be very different after he had been helped out of whatever difficulty it was that had caused him to start dispatching SO S’s.

  It was a buoyant and optimistic Ricky Gilpin who had caught the five o’clock train to Market Blandings on the previous afternoon, and it was a gay and effervescent Ricky Gilpin who now bounded forward with a hamlike hand outstretched. Only then did he observe that his relative’s right arm was in a sling.

  ‘Good Lord, Uncle Alaric,’ he cried, in a voice vibrant with dismay and concern, ‘have you hurt yourself? I’m so sorry. What a shame! How absolutely rotten! How did it happen?’

  The Duke snorted.

  ‘I put my shoulder out, throwing an egg at my secretary.’

  Many young men, on receipt of this information, would have said the wrong thing. Ricky’s manner, however, was perfect. He placed the blame in the right quarter.

  ‘What the dickens was he doing, making you throw eggs at him?’ he demanded indignantly. ‘The man must be an ass. You ought to sack him.’

  ‘I’m going to, directly we’ve had our talk. It was only this morning that I found out he was the feller. Ever since I came here,’ explained the Duke, ‘there’s been a mystery man whistling the “Bonny Bonny Banks of Loch Lomond” day in and day out on the lawn outside my room. Got on my nerves. Beastly song.’

  ‘Foul.’

  ‘I wasn’t going to stand it.’

  ‘Quite right.’

  ‘I laid in eggs.’

  ‘Very sensible.’

  ‘To throw at him.’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘Last night, there he was again with his ‘You take the high road’ and all the rest of it, and I loosed off. And this morning Connie comes to me and says I ought to be ashamed of myself for behaving like that to poor Mr Baxter.’

  ‘What an absolutely imbecile thing to say! Who is this fathead?’

  ‘Emsworth’s sister. Lord Emsworth. Blandings Castle. I’m staying there. She’s potty, of course.’

  ‘Must be. Any balanced woman would have seen in a second that you had right on your side. It seems to me, Uncle Alaric,’ said Ricky, with warmth, ‘that you have been subjected to a campaign of deliberate and systematic persecution, and I’m not surprised that you decided to send for me. What do you want me to do? Throw some more eggs at this man Baxter? Say the word, and I start today.’

  If his arm had not been in a sling, the Duke would have patted his nephew on the back. He was conscious of a keen remorse for having so misjudged him all these years. Ricky Gilpin might have his faults — one looked askance at that habit of his of writing poetry — but his heart was sound.

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘After tonight there won’t be any Baxter to throw eggs at. I sacked him a couple of days ago, and with foolish kind-heartedness took him back, but this time it’s final. What I’ve come to talk to you about is this pig.’

  ‘What pig would that be?’

  ‘Emsworth’s. And there’s another high-handed outrage!’ Ricky was not quite able to follow the trend of his uncle’s remarks. ‘They’ve been setting the pig on you?’ he asked, groping. ‘Emsworth promised to give it to me.’

  ‘Oh, I see.’

  ‘Nothing down in writing, of course, but a gentleman’s agreement, thoroughly understood on both sides. And now he says he won’t.’

  ‘What!’ Ricky had not thought that human nature could sink so low. ‘You mean he intends to go back on his sacred word? The man must be a louse of the first water.’

  The Duke was now quite certain that he had been all wrong about his splendid young man.

  ‘That’s how it strikes you, eh?’

  ‘It is how it would strike any right-thinking person. After all, one has a certain code.’

  ‘Exactly.’

  ‘And one expects other people to live up to it.’

  ‘Quite.’

  ‘So I suppose you want me to pinch this pig for you?’ said Ricky.

  The Duke gasped. His admiration for his nephew had now reached boiling point. He had been expecting to have to spend long minutes in tedious explanation. It was not often, he felt, that you found in the youth of today such lightning intelligence combined with so fine a moral outlook.

  ‘Precisely,’ he said. ‘When you’re dealing with men like Emsworth, you can’t be too nice in your methods.’

  ‘I should say not. Anything goes. Well, how do I set about it? I shall require some pointers, you know.’

  ‘Of course, of course, of course. You shall have them. I have been giving this matter a great deal of thought. I lay awake most of last night —’

  ‘What a shame!’

  ‘— and before I went to sleep I had my plan of campaign mapped out to the last detail. I examined it this morning, and it seems to me flawless. Have you a pencil and a piece of paper?’

  ‘Here you are. I’ll tear off the top page. It has a few rough notes for a ballade on it.’

  ‘Thanks. Now then,’ said the Duke, puffing at his moustache under the strain of artistic composition, ‘I’ll draw a map for you. Here’s the castle. Here’s my room. It’s got a lawn outside it. Lawn,’ he announced, having drawn something that looked like a clumsily fried egg.

  ‘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 estimate
d 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!’