Young Men in Spats Page 16

  ‘Name of Robinson.’

  ‘What about it?’

  ‘My name’s Robinson.’

  ‘Oh, your name’s Robinson? Now we’ve got it straight. Delighted to see you, Mr Robinson. Come right in and take your boots off.’

  They all trickled back to the parlour, Lord Ickenham pointing out objects of interest by the wayside to the chap, Pongo gulping for air a bit and trying to get himself abreast of this new twist in the scenario. His heart was becoming more and more bowed down with weight of woe. He hadn’t liked being Mr Walkinshaw, the anaesthetist, and he didn’t like it any better being Roddis Junior. In brief, he feared the worst. It was only too plain to him by now that his uncle had got it thoroughly up his nose and had settled down to one of his big afternoons, and he was asking himself, as he had so often asked himself before, what would the harvest be?

  Arrived in the parlour, the pink chap proceeded to stand on one leg and look coy.

  ‘Is Julia here?’ he asked, simpering a bit, Pongo says.

  ‘Is she?’ said Lord Ickenham to Pongo.

  ‘No,’ said Pongo.

  ‘No,’ said Lord Ickenham.

  ‘She wired me she was coming here today.’

  ‘Ah, then we shall have a bridge four.’

  The pink chap stood on the other leg.

  ‘I don’t suppose you’ve ever met Julia. Bit of trouble in the family, she gave me to understand.’

  ‘It is often the way.’

  ‘The Julia I mean is your niece Julia Parker. Or, rather, your wife’s niece Julia Parker.’

  ‘Any niece of my wife is a niece of mine,’ said Lord Ickenham heartily. ‘We share and share alike.’

  ‘Julia and I want to get married.’

  ‘Well, go ahead.’

  ‘But they won’t let us.’

  ‘Who won’t?’

  ‘Her mother and father. And Uncle Charlie Parker and Uncle Henry Parker and the rest of them. They don’t think I’m good enough.’

  ‘The morality of the modern young man is notoriously lax.’

  ‘Class enough, I mean. They’re a haughty lot.’

  ‘What makes them haughty? Are they earls?’

  ‘No, they aren’t earls.’

  ‘Then why the devil,’ said Lord Ickenham warmly, ‘are they haughty? Only earls have a right to be haughty. Earls are hot stuff. When you get an earl, you’ve got something.’

  ‘Besides, we’ve had words. Me and her father. One thing led to another, and in the end I called him a perishing old— Coo!’ said the pink chap, breaking off suddenly.

  He had been standing by the window, and he now leaped lissomely into the middle of the room, causing Pongo, whose nervous system was by this time definitely down among the wines and spirits and who hadn’t been expecting this adagio stuff, to bite his tongue with some severity.

  ‘They’re on the doorstep! Julia and her mother and father. I didn’t know they were all coming.’

  ‘You do not wish to meet them?’

  ‘No, I don’t!’

  ‘Then duck behind the settee, Mr Robinson,’ said Lord Ickenham, and the pink chap, weighing the advice and finding it good, did so. And as he disappeared the door bell rang.

  Once more, Lord Ickenham led Pongo out into the hall.

  ‘I say!’ said Pongo, and a close observer might have noted that he was quivering like an aspen.

  ‘Say on, my dear boy.’

  ‘I mean to say, what?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘You aren’t going to let these bounders in, are you?’

  ‘Certainly,’ said Lord Ickenham. ‘We Roddises keep open house. And as they are presumably aware that Mr Roddis has no son, I think we had better return to the old layout. You are the local vet, my boy, come to minister to my parrot. When I return, I should like to find you by the cage, staring at the bird in a scientific manner. Tap your teeth from time to time with a pencil and try to smell of iodoform. It will help to add conviction.’

  So Pongo shifted back to the parrot’s cage and stared so earnestly that it was only when a voice said ‘Well!’ that he became aware that there was anybody in the room. Turning, he perceived that Hampshire’s leading curse had come back, bringing the gang.

  It consisted of a stern, thin, middle-aged woman, a middle-aged man and a girl.

  You can generally accept Pongo’s estimate of girls, and when he says that this one was a pippin one knows that he uses the term in its most exact sense. She was about nineteen, he thinks, and she wore a black beret, a dark-green leather coat, a shortish tweed skirt, silk stockings and high-heeled shoes. Her eyes were large and lustrous and her face like a dewy rosebud at daybreak on a June morning. So Pongo tells me. Not that I suppose he has ever seen a rosebud at daybreak on a June morning, because it’s generally as much as you can do to lug him out of bed in time for nine-thirty breakfast. Still, one gets the idea.

  ‘Well,’ said the woman, ‘you don’t know who I am, I’ll be bound. I’m Laura’s sister Connie. This is Claude, my husband. And this is my daughter Julia. Is Laura in?’

  ‘I regret to say, no,’ said Lord Ickenham.

  The woman was looking at him as if he didn’t come up to her specifications.

  ‘I thought you were younger,’ she said.

  ‘Younger than what?’ said Lord Ickenham.

  ‘Younger than you are.’

  ‘You can’t be younger than you are, worse luck,’ said Lord Ickenham. ‘Still, one does one’s best, and I am bound to say that of recent years I have made a pretty good go of it.’

  The woman caught sight of Pongo, and he didn’t seem to please her, either.

  ‘Who’s that?’

  ‘The local vet, clustering round my parrot.’

  ‘I can’t talk in front of him.’

  ‘It is quite all right,’ Lord Ickenham assured her. ‘The poor fellow is stone deaf.’

  And with an imperious gesture at Pongo, as much as to bid him stare less at girls and more at parrots, he got the company seated.

  ‘Now, then,’ he said.

  There was silence for a moment, then a sort of muffled sob, which Pongo thinks proceeded from the girl. He couldn’t see, of course, because his back was turned and he was looking at the parrot, which looked back at him – most offensively, he says, as parrots will, using one eye only for the purpose. It also asked him to have a nut.

  The woman came into action again.

  ‘Although,’ she said, ‘Laura never did me the honour to invite me to her wedding, for which reason I have not communicated with her for five years, necessity compels me to cross her threshold today. There comes a time when differences must be forgotten and relatives must stand shoulder to shoulder.’

  ‘I see what you mean,’ said Lord Ickenham. ‘Like the boys of the old brigade.’

  ‘What I say is, let bygones be bygones. I would not have intruded on you, but needs must. I disregard the past and appeal to your sense of pity.’

  The thing began to look to Pongo like a touch, and he is convinced that the parrot thought so, too, for it winked and cleared its throat. But they were both wrong. The woman went on.

  ‘I want you and Laura to take Julia into your home for a week or so, until I can make other arrangements for her. Julia is studying the piano, and she sits for her examination in two weeks’ time, so until then she must remain in London. The trouble is, she has fallen in love. Or thinks she has.’

  ‘I know I have,’ said Julia.

  Her voice was so attractive that Pongo was compelled to slew round and take another look at her. Her eyes, he says, were shining like twin stars and there was a sort of Soul’s Awakening expression on her face, and what the dickens there was in a pink chap like the pink chap, who even as pink chaps go wasn’t much of a pink chap, to make her look like that, was frankly, Pongo says, more than he could understand. The thing baffled him. He sought in vain for a solution.

  ‘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 one
selves.’

  ‘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.