‘But I wouldn’t dream . . .’
‘Ah, but if you didn’t, if you spoke approvingly of the School Treat, what then? The next thing that would happen would be that she would be asking you to help her run it. And that would bore you stiff.’
Barmy shook from stem to stern. This was better even than he had hoped.
‘You don’t mean she would let me help her with the School Treat?’
‘Why, you wouldn’t do it, would you?’
‘I should enjoy it above all things.’
‘Well, if that’s the way you feel, the matter can easily be arranged. She will be here any moment now to pick me up in her car.’
And, sure enough, not two minutes later there floated through the open window a silvery voice, urging the fellow, who seemed to answer to the name of ‘Fathead,’ to come out quick, because the voice did not intend to remain there all night.
So the fellow took Barmy out, and there was the girl, sitting in a two-seater. He introduced Barmy. The girl beamed. Barmy beamed. The fellow said that Barmy was anxious to come and help with the School Treat. The girl beamed again. Barmy beamed again. And presently the car drove off, the girl’s last words being a reminder that the binge started at two sharp on the Monday.
That night, as they dined together, Barmy and Pongo put in their usual spot of rehearsing. It was their practice to mould and shape the act during meals, as they found that mastication seemed to sharpen their intellect. But tonight it would have been plain to an observant spectator that their hearts were not in it. There was an unmistakable coolness between them. Pongo said he had an aunt who complained of rheumatism, and Barmy said, Well, who wouldn’t? And Barmy said his father could not meet his creditors, and Pongo said, Did he want to? But the old fire and sparkle were absent. And they had relapsed into a moody silence when the door opened and the barmaid pushed her head in.
‘Miss Briscoe has just sent over a message, Mr Phipps,’ said the barmaid. ‘She says she would like you to be there a little earlier than two, if you can manage it. One-fifteen, if possible, because there’s always so much to do.’
‘Oh, right,’ said Barmy, a bit rattled, for he had heard the sharp hiss of his companion’s in-drawn breath.
‘I’ll tell her,’ said the barmaid.
She withdrew, and Barmy found Pongo’s eyes resting on him like a couple of blobs of vitriol.
‘What’s all this?’ asked Pongo.
Barmy tried to be airy.
‘Oh, it’s nothing. Just the local School Treat. The vicar’s daughter here – a Miss Briscoe – seems anxious that I should drop round on Monday and help her run it.’
Pongo started to grind his teeth, but he had a chunk of potato in his mouth at the moment and was hampered. But he gripped the table till his knuckles stood out white under the strain.
‘Have you been sneaking round behind my back and inflicting your beastly society on Miss Briscoe?’ he demanded.
‘I do not like your tone, Reginald.’
‘Never mind about my tone. I’ll attend to my tone. Of all the bally low hounds that ever stepped you are the lowest. So this is what the friendship of years amounts to, is it? You crawl in here and try to cut me out with the girl I love.’
‘Well, dash it . . .’
‘That is quite enough.’
‘But, dash it . . .’
‘I wish to hear no more.’
‘But, dash it, I love her, too. It’s not my fault if you happen to love her, too, is it? I mean to say, if a fellow loves a girl and another fellow loves her, too, you can’t expect the fellow who loves the girl to edge out because he happens to be acquainted with the fellow who loves her, too. When it comes to Love, a chap has got to look out for his own interests, hasn’t he? You didn’t find Romeo or any of those chaps easing away from the girl just to oblige a pal, did you? Certainly not. So I don’t see . . .’
‘Please!’ said Pongo.
A silence fell.
‘Might I trouble you to pass the mustard, Fotheringay-Phipps,’ said Pongo coldly.
‘Certainly, Twistleton-Twistleton,’ replied Barmy, with equal hauteur.
It is always unpleasant not to be on speaking terms with an old friend. To be cooped up alone in a mouldy village pub with an old friend with whom one has ceased to converse is simply rotten. And this is especially so if the day happens to be a Sunday.
Maiden Eggesford, like so many of our rural hamlets, is not at its best and brightest on a Sunday. When you have walked down the main street and looked at the Jubilee Watering-Trough, there is nothing much to do except go home and then come out again and walk down the main street once more and take another look at the Jubilee Watering-Trough. It will give you some rough idea of the state to which Barmy Fotheringay-Phipps had been reduced by the end of the next day when I tell you that the sound of the church bells ringing for evensong brought him out of the Goose and Grasshopper as if he had heard a fire-engine. The thought that at last something was going to happen in Maiden Eggesford in which the Jubilee Watering-Trough motif was not stressed, stirred him strangely. He was in his pew in three jumps. And as the service got under way he began to feel curious emotions going on in his bosom.
There is something about evening church in a village in the summer-time that affects the most hard-boiled. They had left the door open, and through it came the scent of lime trees and wall-flowers and the distant hum of bees fooling about. And gradually there poured over Barmy a wave of sentiment. As he sat and listened to the First Lesson he became a changed man.
The Lesson was one of those chapters of the Old Testament all about how Abimelech begat Jazzbo and Jazzbo begat Zachariah. And, what with the beauty of the words and the peace of his surroundings, Barmy suddenly began to become conscious of a great remorse.
He had not done the square thing, he told himself, by dear old Pongo. Here was a chap, notoriously one of the best, as sound an egg as ever donned a heliotrope sock, and he was deliberately chiselling him out of the girl he loved. He was doing the dirty on a fellow whom he had been pally with since their Eton jacket days – a bloke who time and again had shared with him his last bar of almond-rock. Was this right? Was this just? Would Abimelech have behaved like that to Jazzbo or – for the matter of that – Jazzbo to Zachariah? The answer, he could not disguise from himself, was in the negative.
It was a different, stronger Barmy, a changed, chastened Cyril Fotheringay-Phipps, who left the sacred edifice at the conclusion of the Vicar’s fifty-minute sermon. He had made the great decision. It would play the dickens with his heart and probably render the rest of his life a blank, but nevertheless he would retire from the unseemly struggle and give the girl up to Pongo.
That night, as they cold-suppered together, Barmy cleared his throat and looked across at Pongo with a sad, sweet smile.
‘Pongo,’ he said.
The other glanced distantly up from his baked potato.
‘There is something you wish to say to me, Fotheringay-Phipps?’
‘Yes,’ said Barmy. ‘A short while ago I sent a note to Miss Briscoe, informing her that I shall not be attending the School Treat and mentioning that you will be there in my stead. Take her, Pongo, old man. She is yours. I scratch my nomination.’
Pongo stared. His whole manner changed. It was as if he had been a Trappist monk who had suddenly decided to give Trappism a miss and become one of the boys again.
‘But, dash it, this is noble!’
‘No, no.’
‘But it is! It’s . . . well, dash it, I hardly know what to say.’
‘I hope you will be very, very happy.’
‘Thanks, old man.’
‘Very, very, very happy.’
‘Rather! I should say so. And I’ll tell you one thing. In the years to come there will always be a knife and fork for you at our little home. The children shall be taught to call you Uncle Barmy.’
‘Thanks,’ said Barmy. ‘Thanks.’
‘Not at all,’ said Pongo. ‘Not a
t all.’
At this moment, the barmaid entered with a note for Barmy. He read it and crumpled it up.
‘From Her?’ asked Pongo.
‘Yes.’
‘Saying she quite understands, and so forth?’
‘Yes.’
Pongo ate a piece of cheese in a meditative manner. He seemed to be pursuing some train of thought.
‘I should think,’ he said, ‘that a fellow who married a clergyman’s daughter would get the ceremony performed at cut rates, wouldn’t he?’
‘Probably.’
‘If not absolutely on the nod?’
‘I shouldn’t wonder.’
‘Not,’ said Pongo, ‘that I am influenced by any consideration like that, of course. My love is pure and flamelike, with no taint of dross. Still, in times like these, every little helps.’
‘Quite,’ said Barmy. ‘Quite.’
He found it hard to control his voice. He had lied to his friend about that note. What Angelica Briscoe had really said in it was that it was quite all right if he wanted to edge out of the School Treat, but that she would require him to take the Village Mothers for their Annual Outing on the same day. There had to be some responsible person with them, and the curate had sprained his ankle tripping over a footstool in the vestry.
Barmy could read between the lines. He saw what this meant. His fatal fascination had done its deadly work, and the girl had become infatuated with him. No other explanation would fit the facts. It was absurd to suppose that she would lightly have selected him for this extraordinarily important assignment. Obviously it was the big event of the village year. Anyone would do to mess about at the School Treat, but Angelica Briscoe would place in charge of the Mothers’ Annual Outing only a man she trusted . . . respected . . . loved.
He sighed. What must be, he felt, must be. He had done his conscientious best to retire in favour of his friend, but Fate had been too strong.
I found it a little difficult (said the Crumpet) to elicit from Barmy exactly what occurred at the annual outing of the Village Mothers of Maiden Eggesford. When telling me the story, he had the air of a man whose old wound is troubling him. It was not, indeed, till the fourth cocktail that he became really communicative. And then, speaking with a kind of stony look in his eye, he gave me a fairly comprehensive account. But even then each word seemed to hurt him in some tender spot.
The proceedings would appear to have opened in a quiet and orderly manner. Sixteen females of advanced years assembled in a motor coach, and the expedition was seen off from the Vicarage door by the Rev. P. P. Briscoe in person. Under his eye, Barmy tells me, the Beauty Chorus was demure and docile. It was a treat to listen to their murmured responses. As nice and respectable a bunch of mothers, Barmy says, as he had ever struck. His only apprehension at this point, he tells me, was lest the afternoon’s proceedings might possibly be a trifle stodgy. He feared a touch of ennui.
He needn’t have worried. There was no ennui.
The human cargo, as I say, had started out in a spirit of demureness and docility. But it was amazing what a difference a mere fifty yards of the high road made to these Mothers. No sooner were they out of sight of the Vicarage than they began to effervesce to an almost unbelievable extent. The first intimation Barmy had that the binge was going to be run on lines other than those which he had anticipated was when a very stout Mother in a pink bonnet and a dress covered with bugles suddenly picked off a passing cyclist with a well-directed tomato, causing him to skid into a ditch. Upon which, all sixteen mothers laughed like fiends in hell, and it was plain that they considered that the proceedings had now been formally opened.
Of course, looking back at it now in a calmer spirit, Barmy tells me that he can realize that there is much to be said in palliation of the exuberance of these ghastly female pimples. When you are shut up all the year round in a place like Maiden Eggesford, with nothing to do but wash underclothing and attend Divine Service, you naturally incline to let yourself go a bit at times of festival and holiday. But at the moment he did not think of this, and his spiritual agony was pretty pronounced.
If there’s one thing Barmy hates it’s being conspicuous, and conspicuous is precisely what a fellow cannot fail to be when he’s in a motor coach with sixteen women of mature ages who alternate between singing ribald songs and hurling volleys of homely chaff at passers-by. In this connection, he tells me, he is thinking particularly of a Mother in spectacles and a Homburg hat, which she had pinched from the driver of the vehicle, whose prose style appeared to have been modelled on that of Rabelais.
It was a more than usually penetrating sally on the part of this female which at length led him to venture a protest.
‘I say! I mean, I say. I say, dash it, you know. I mean, dash it,’ said Barmy, feeling, even as he spoke, that the rebuke had not been phrased as neatly as he could have wished.
Still, lame though it had been, it caused a sensation which can only be described as profound. Mother looked at Mother. Eyebrows were raised, breath drawn in censoriously.
‘Young man,’ said the Mother in the pink bonnet, who seemed to have elected herself forewoman, ‘kindly keep your remarks to yourself.’
Another Mother said: ‘The idea!’ and a third described him as a kill-joy.
‘We don’t want none of your impudence,’ said the one in the pink bonnet.
‘Ah!’ agreed the others.
‘A slip of a boy like that!’ said the Mother in the Homburg hat, and there was a general laugh, as if the meeting considered that the point had been well taken.
Barmy subsided. He was wishing that he had yielded to the advice of his family and become a curate after coming down from the University. Curates are specially trained to handle this sort of situation. A tough, hard-boiled curate, spitting out of the corner of his mouth, would soon have subdued these mothers, he reflected. He would have played on them as on a stringed instrument – or, rather, as on sixteen stringed instruments. But Barmy, never having taken orders, was helpless.
So helpless, indeed, that when he suddenly discovered that they were heading for Bridmouth-on-Sea he felt that there was nothing he could do about it. From the vicar’s own lips he had had it officially that the programme was that the expedition should drive to the neighbouring village of Bottsford Mortimer, where there were the ruins of an old abbey, replete with interest; lunch among these ruins; visit the local museum (founded and presented to the village by the late Sir Wandesbury Pott, J.P.); and, after filling in with a bit of knitting, return home. And now the whole trend of the party appeared to be towards the Amusement Park on the Bridmouth pier. And, though Barmy’s whole soul shuddered at the thought of these sixteen Bacchantes let loose in an Amusement Park, he hadn’t the nerve to say a word.
It was at about this point, he tells me, that a vision rose before him of Pongo happily loafing through the summer afternoon amidst the placid joys of the School Treat.
Of what happened at the Amusement Park Barmy asked me to be content with the sketchiest of outlines. He said that even now he could not bear to let his memory dwell upon it. He confessed himself perplexed by the psychology of the thing. These mothers, he said, must have had mothers of their own and at those mothers’ knees must have learned years ago the difference between right and wrong, and yet . . . Well, what he was thinking of particularly, he said, was what occurred on the Bump the Bumps apparatus. He refused to specify exactly, but he said that there was one woman in a puce mantle who definitely seemed to be living for pleasure alone.
It was a little unpleasantness with the proprietor of this concern that eventually led to the expedition leaving the Amusement Park and going down to the beach. Some purely technical point of finance, I understand – he claiming that a Mother in bombazine had had eleven rides and only paid once. It resulted in Barmy getting lugged into the brawl and rather roughly handled – which was particularly unfortunate, because the bombazined Mother explained on their way down to the beach that the whole thing had be
en due to a misunderstanding. In actual fact, what had really happened was that she had had twelve rides and paid twice.
However, he was so glad to get his little troupe out of the place that he counted an eye well blacked as the price of deliverance, and his spirits, he tells me, had definitely risen when suddenly the sixteen mothers gave a simultaneous whoop and made for a sailing-boat which was waiting to be hired, sweeping him along with them. And the next moment they were off across the bay, bowling along before a nippy breeze which, naturally, cheesed it abruptly as soon as it had landed them far enough away from shore to make things interesting for the unfortunate blighter who had to take to the oars.
This, of course, was poor old Barmy. There was a man in charge of the boat, but he, though but a rough, untutored salt, had enough sense not to let himself in for a job like rowing this Noah’s Ark home. Barmy did put it up to him tentatively, but the fellow said that he had to attend to the steering, and when Barmy said that he, Barmy, knew how to steer, the fellow said that he, the fellow, could not entrust a valuable boat to an amateur. After which, he lit his pipe and lolled back in the stern sheets with rather the air of an ancient Roman banqueter making himself cosy among the cushions. And Barmy, attaching himself to a couple of oars of about the size of those served out to galley-slaves in the old trireme days, started to put his back into it.
For a chap who hadn’t rowed anything except a light canoe since he was up at Oxford, he considers he did dashed well, especially when you take into account the fact that he was much hampered by the Mothers. They would insist on singing that thing about ‘Give yourself a pat on the back,’ and, apart from the fact that Barmy considered that something on the lines of the Volga Boat-Song would have been far more fitting, it was a tune it was pretty hard to keep time to. Seven times he caught crabs, and seven times those sixteen mothers stopped singing and guffawed like one Mother. All in all, a most painful experience. Add the fact that the first thing the females did on hitting the old Homeland again was to get up an informal dance on the sands and that the ride home in the quiet evenfall was more or less a repetition of the journey out, and you will agree with me that Barmy, as he eventually tottered into the saloon bar of the Goose and Grasshopper, had earned the frothing tankard which he now proceeded to order.