Uncle Fred in the Springtime Page 5

  Swooping down on Horace’s flat, at a moment when Pongo was there chatting with its proprietor, and ignoring her loved one’s protesting cries, Valerie Twistleton had scooped up virtually his entire outfit and borne it away in a cab, to be given to the deserving poor. She could not actually leave the unhappy man in the nude, so she had allowed him to retain the shabby grey flannel suit he stood up in and also the morning clothes which he was reserving for the wedding day. But she had got away with all the rest, and as no tailor could have delivered a fresh supply at this early dare, Pongo had felt justified in plunging to the uttermost. The bulk of his fortune on Grey Flannel at ten to one and a small covering bet on Morning Suit, and there he was, sitting pretty.

  And he was just sipping his cocktail and reflecting that, while his winnings must necessarily fall far short of the stupendous sum which he owed to George Budd, they would at least constitute something on account and remove the dark shadow of Erb at any rate temporarily from his life, when like a blow on the base of the skull there came to him the realization that he had overlooked a vital point.

  The opening words of his conversation with Claude Pott came back to him, and he remembered that Mr Pott, in addition to informing him that Horace was in the telephone booth, had stated that the latter had attended the Bohemian Ball at the Albert Hall and had not been to bed yet. And like the knell of a tolling bell there rang in his ears Horace’s words: ‘I am going as a Boy Scout.’

  The smoking room reeled before Pongo’s eyes. He saw now why Claude Pott had leaped so enthusiastically at the idea of starting these Clothes Stakes. The man had known it would be a skinner for the book. The shrewdest and most imaginative Drone would never think of Boy Scouts in telephone booths at this hour of the morning.

  He uttered a stricken cry. At the eleventh hour the road to wealth had been indicated to him, and owing to that ready-money clause he was not in a position to take advantage of the fact. And then he caught sight of Oofy Prosser at the other end of the bar, and saw how by swift, decisive action he might save his fortunes from the wreck.

  The attitude of Oofy Prosser towards the Clothes Stakes had been from the first contemptuous and supercilious, like that of a Wolf of Wall Street watching small boys scrambling for pennies. This Silver Ring stuff did not interest Oofy. He held himself aloof from it, and as the latter slid down the bar and accosted him he tried to hold himself aloof from Pongo. It was only by clutching his coat sleeve and holding on to it with a fevered grip that Pongo was able to keep him rooted to the spot.

  ‘I say, Oofy —’

  ‘No,’ replied Oofy Prosser curtly. ‘Not a penny!’

  Pongo danced a few frantic dance steps. Already there was a lull over by the table where Mr Port was conducting his business, and the closing of the book seemed imminent.

  ‘But I want to put you on to a good thing!’

  ‘Oh?’

  ‘A cert.’

  ‘Ah?’

  ‘An absolute dashed cast-iron cert. ‘Oofy Prosser sneered visibly.

  ‘I’m not betting. What’s the use of winning a couple of quid? Why, last Sunday at the big table at Le Touquet —’

  Pongo sped towards Claude Pott, scattering Eggs, Beans and Crumpets from his path.

  ‘Mr Port!’

  ‘Sir?’

  ‘Any limit?’

  ‘No, sir.’

  ‘I’ve a friend here who wants to put on something big.’

  ‘Ready money only, Mr T., may I remind you? It’s the law.’

  ‘Nonsense. This is Mr Prosser. You can take his cheque. You must have heard of Mr Prosser.’

  ‘Oh, Mr Prosser? Yes, that’s different. I don’t mind breaking the law to oblige Mr Prosser.’

  Pongo, bounding back to the bar, found there an Oofy no longer aloof and supercilious.

  ‘Do you really know something, Pongo?’

  ‘You bet I know something. Will you cut me in for fifty?’

  ‘All right.’

  ‘Then put your shirt on Boy Scout,’ hissed Pongo. ‘I have first-hand stable information that the bloke in the telephone booth is Horace Davenport, and I happen to know that he went to a fancy-dress dance last night as a Boy Scout and hasn’t been home to change yet.’

  ‘What! Is that right?’

  ‘Absolutely official.’

  ‘Then it’s money for jam!’

  ‘Money for pickles,’ asserted Pongo enthusiastically. ‘Follow me and fear nothing. And don’t forget I’m in for the sum I mentioned.’

  With a kindling eye he watched his financial backer force his way into the local Tattersall’s, and it was at this tense moment that a page-boy came up and informed him that Lord Ickenham was waiting for him in the hall. He went floating out to meet him, his feet scarcely touching the carpet.

  Lord Ickenham watched his approach with interest.

  ‘Aha!’ he said.

  ‘Aha!’ said Pongo, but absently, as one who has no time for formal greetings. ‘Listen, Uncle Fred, slip me every bally cent you’ve got on you. I may just be able to get it down before the book closes. Your pal, Claude Pott, came here with Horace Davenport —’

  ‘I wonder what Horace was doing, bringing Mustard to the Drones. Capital chap, of course, but quite the wrong person to let loose in a gathering of impressionable young men.’

  Pongo’s manner betrayed impatience.

  ‘We haven’t time to go into the ethics of the thing. Suffice it that Horace did bring him, and he shut Horace up in the telephone booth and started a book on what sort of clothes he had on. How much can you raise?’

  ‘To wager against Mustard Port?’ Lord Ickenham smiled gently. ‘Nothing, my dear boy, nothing. One of the hard lessons Life will teach you, as you grow to know him better, is that you can’t make money out of Mustard. Hundreds have tried it, and hundreds have failed.’

  Pongo shrugged his shoulders. He had done his best.

  ‘Well, you’re missing the chance of a lifetime. I happen to know that Horace went to a dance last night as a Boy Scout, and I have it from Port’s own lips that he hasn’t been home to change. Oofy Prosser is carrying me for fifty.’

  It was evident from his expression that Lord Ickenham was genuinely shocked. ‘Horace Davenport went to a dance as a Boy Scout? What a ghastly sight he must have looked. I can’t believe this. I must verify it. Bates,’ said Lord Ickenham, walking over to the hall porter’s desk, ‘were you here when Mr Davenport came in?’

  ‘Yes, m’lord.’

  ‘How did he look?’

  ‘Terrible, m’lord.’

  It seemed to Pongo that his uncle had wandered from the point.

  ‘I concede,’ he said, ‘that a chap of Horace’s height and skinniness ought to have been shrewder than to flaunt himself at a public dance in the costume of a Boy Scout. Involving as it does, knickerbockers and bare knees —’

  ‘But he didn’t, sir.’

  ‘What!’

  The hall porter was polite, but firm.

  ‘Mr Davenport didn’t go to no dance as no Boy ruddy Scout, if you’ll pardon me contradicting you, sir. More like some sort of negroid character, it seemed to me. His face was all blacked up, and he had a spear with him. Gave me a nasty turn when he come through.’

  Pongo clutched the desk. The hall porter’s seventeen stone seemed to be swaying before his eyes.

  ‘Blacked up?’

  A movement along the passage attracted their attention. Claude Pott, accompanied by a small committee, was proceeding to the telephone booth. He removed the wedge from beneath the door, and as he opened it there emerged a figure.

  Nature hath framed strange fellows in her time, but few stranger than the one that now whizzed past the little group at the desk and, bursting through the door of the club, whizzed down the steps and into a passing cab.

  The face of this individual, as the hall porter had foreshadowed, was a rich black in colour. Its long body was draped in tights of the same sombre hue, surmounted by a leopard’s skin. Towering
above its head was a head-dress of ostrich feathers, and in its right hand it grasped an assegai. It was wearing tortoise-shell-rimmed spectacles. Pongo, sliding back against the desk, found his arm gripped by a kindly hand.

  ‘Shift ho, my boy, I think, eh?’ said Lord Ickenham. ‘There would appear to be nothing to keep you here, and a meeting with Oofy Prosser at this moment might be fraught with pain and embarrassment. Let us follow Horace — he seemed to be homing —and hold an enquiry into this in-and-out running of his. Tell me, how much did you say Oofy Prosser was carrying you for? Fifty pounds?’

  Pongo nodded bleakly.

  ‘Then let us assemble the facts. Your assets are nil. You owe George Budd two hundred. You now owe Oofy fifty. If you don’t pay Oofy, he will presumably report you to the committee and have you thrown into the street, where you will doubtless find Erb waiting for you with a knuckleduster. Well,’ said Lord Ickenham, impressed, ‘nobody can say you don’t lead a full life. To a yokel like myself all this is very stimulating. One has the sense of being right at the pulsing heart of things.’

  They came to Bloxham Mansions, and were informed by Webster that Mr Davenport was in his bath.

  5

  The Horace who entered the library some ten minutes later in pajamas and a dressing-gown was a far more prepossessing spectacle than the ghastly figure which had popped our of the Drones Club telephone booth, but he was still patently a man who had suffered. His face, scrubbed with butter and rinsed with soap and water, shone rosily, but it was a haggard face, and the eyes were dark with anguish.

  Into these eyes, as he beheld the senior of his two visitors, there crept a look of alarm. Horace Davenport was not unfamiliar with stories in which the male relatives of injured girls called on young men with horsewhips.

  Lord Ickenham’s manner, however, was reassuring. Though considering him weak in the head, he had always liked Horace, and he was touched by the forlornness of his aspect.

  ‘How are you, my dear fellow? I looked in earlier in the day, but you were out.’

  ‘Yes, Webster told me.’

  ‘And when I saw you at the Drones just now, you seemed pressed for time and nor in the mood for conversation. I wanted to have a talk with you about this unfortunate rift between yourself and Valerie. She has given me a fairly comprehensive eye-witness’s report of the facts.’

  Horace seemed to swallow something jagged.

  ‘Oh, has she?’

  ‘Yes. I was chatting with her last night, and your name happened to come up.’

  ‘Oh, did it?’

  ‘Yes. In fact, she rather dwelt on you. Valerie — we must face it — is piqued.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘But don’t let that worry you,’ said Lord Ickenham cheerily. ‘She’ll come round. I’m convinced of it. When you reach my age, you will know that it is an excellent sign when a girl speaks of a man as a goggle-eyed nitwit and says that her dearest wish is to dip him in boiling oil and watch him wriggle.’

  ‘Did she say that?’

  ‘Yes, she was most definite about it — showing, I feel, that love still lingers. My advice is — give her a day or two to cool off, and then start sending her flowers. She will tear them to shreds. Send some more. She will rend them to ribbons. Shoot in a further supply. And very soon, if you persevere, you will find that the little daily dose is having its effect. I anticipate a complete reconciliation somewhere about the first week in May.’

  ‘I see,’ said Horace moodily. ‘Well, that’s fine.’ Lord Ickenham felt a trifle ruffled.

  ‘You don’t seem pleased.’

  ‘Oh, I am. Oh yes, rather.’

  ‘Then why do you continue to look like a dead fish on a slab?’

  ‘Well, the fact is, there’s something else worrying me a bit at the moment.’

  Pongo broke a silence which had lasted for some twenty minutes. Since entering the apartment he had been sitting with folded arms, as if hewn from the living rock.

  ‘Oh, is there?’ he cried. ‘And there’s something that’s jolly well worrying me at the moment. Did you or did you not, you blighted Pendlebury-Davenport, definitely and specifically state to me that you were going to that Ball as a Boy Scout? Come on now. Did you or didn’t you?’

  ‘Yes, I did. I remember. But I changed my mind.’

  ‘Changed your mind! Coo!’ said Pongo, speaking through tightly clenched teeth and borrowing from the powerful vocabulary of Claude Port to give emphasis to his words. ‘He changed his mind! He changed his bally mind! Ha! Coo! Cor!’

  ‘Why, what’s up?’

  ‘Oh, nothing. You have merely utterly and completely ruined me, that’s all.’

  ‘Yes, my dear Horace,’ said Lord Ickenham, ‘I’m afraid you have let Pongo down rather badly. When Pongo joins the Foreign Legion, the responsibility will be yours. You give him your solemn assurance that you are going to the Ball in one costume and actually attend it in another. Not very British.’

  ‘But why does it matter?’

  ‘There was some betting in the club smoking-room on what you were wearing, and Pongo, unhappy lad, plunging in the light of what he thought was inside knowledge on Boy Scout, took the knock.’

  ‘Oh, I say! I’m frightfully sorry.’

  ‘Too late to be sorry now.’

  ‘The thing was, you see, that Polly thought it would be fun if I went as a Zulu warrior.’

  ‘Evidently a girl of exotic and rather unwholesome tastes. The word “morbid” is one that springs to the lips. Who is this Polly?’

  ‘Port’s daughter. She went to the Ball with me.’

  Lord Ickenham uttered an exclamation.

  ‘Not little Polly Port? Good heavens, how time flies. Fancy Polly being old enough to go to dances. I knew her when she was a kid. She used to come and spend her holidays at Ickenham. A very jolly child she was, too, beloved by all. Quite grown up now, eh? Well, well, we’re none of us getting younger. I was a boy in the early fifties when I saw her last. So you took Polly to the Ball, did you?’

  ‘Yes. You see, the original idea was that Valerie was to have gone. But when she gave me the bird, I told her I would take Polly instead.’

  ‘Your view being, of course, that that would learn her? A fine, defiant gesture. Did Port go along?’

  ‘No, he wasn’t there.’

  ‘Then what was he doing at the Drones with you?’

  ‘Well, you see, he had come to Marlborough Street to pay my fine, and we sort of drifted on there afterwards. I suppose I had some idea of buying him a drink or something.’

  A faint stir of interest ruffled the stone of Pongo’s face.

  ‘What do you mean, your fine? Were you pinched last night?’

  ‘Yes. There was a bit of unpleasantness at the Ball, and they scooped me in. It was Ricky’s fault.’

  ‘Who,’ asked Lord Ickenham, ‘is Ricky?’

  ‘My cousin. Alaric Gilpin.’

  ‘Poet. Beefy chap with red hair. It was he who introduced this girl Polly to Horace,’ interpolated Pongo, supplying additional footnotes. ‘She was giving him dancing lessons.’

  ‘And how did he come to mix you up in unpleasantness?’

  ‘Well, it was like this. Ricky, though I didn’t know it, is engaged to Polly. And another thing I didn’t know was that he hadn’t much liked the idea of her giving me dancing lessons and, when she told him I was taking her to the Ball, expressly forbade her to go. So when he found us together there…. I say, he wasn’t hanging about outside when you arrived, was he?’

  ‘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.’