‘Miss Bostock, I believe? My name is Brabazon-Plank. I am a guest at your father’s house.’
This, of course, made it all quite different. One of the gang. Hermione became cordial.
‘Oh, how do you do?’
‘How do you do? Could you spare me a moment?’
‘Why, of course. How odd that you should have known who I was.’
‘Not at all. Yours, if I may say so, are features which, once seen, cannot be forgotten. I have had the privilege of studying a photograph of you.’
‘Oh, yes, the one in the Tatler.’
‘Not the one in the Tatler. The one which your cousin, William Oakshott, carries always next to his heart. I should explain,’ said Lord Ickenham, ‘that I was the leader of the expedition up the Amazon of which Bill Oakshott was so prominent a member, and every time he got a touch of fever he would pull your photograph out and kiss it, murmuring in a faint voice “I love her, I love her, I love her.” Very touching, I thought it, and so did all the rest of the personnel of the expedition. It made us feel finer, better men.’
Hermione was staring. Had she been a less beautiful girl, it might have been said that she goggled. This revelation of a passion which she had never so much as suspected had come as a complete surprise. Looking on Bill as a sort of brother, she had always supposed that he looked on her as a sort of sister. It was as if she had lived for years beside some gentle English hill and suddenly discovered one morning that it was a volcano full to the brim of molten lava.
‘And don’t get the idea,’ proceeded Lord Ickenham, ‘that he spoke thus only when running a temperature. It was rare for half an hour to pass without him whipping out your photograph and kissing it. So you see he did not forget you while he was away, as so many young men are apt, once they are abroad, to forget the girl to whom they are engaged. His heart was always true. For when he said “I love her, I love her, I love her,” it seemed to me that there was only one construction that could be placed on his remarks. He meant that he loved you. And may I be allowed to say,’ went on Lord Ickenham with a paternal smile, ‘how delighted I am to meet you at last and to see at a glance that you are just the girl for him. This engagement makes me very happy.’
‘But —’
‘He will be getting a prize. And so, my dear, will you. I know few men whom I respect more than William Oakshott. Of all my circle he is the one I would choose first to be at my side in the event of unpleasantness with an alligator. And while it may be argued, and with perfect justice, that the part which alligators play in the average normal married life is not a large one, it is no bad thing for a girl to have a husband capable of putting them in their place. The man who can prop an alligator’s jaws open with a stick and then, avoiding its lashing tail, dispatch it with a meat axe is a man who can be trusted to help fire the cook. So no one will rejoice more heartily than I when the bells ring out in the little village church and you come tripping down the aisle on Bill Oakshott’s sinewy arm. This will happen very shortly, I suppose, now that he is back with you once more?’
He paused, beaming benevolently, and Hermione, who had made several attempts to speak, at last found herself able to do so.
‘But I am not engaged to Bill.’
‘Nonsense. You must be. How about all that “I love her, I love her, I love her” stuff?’
‘I am engaged to someone else. If you are staying at the house, you will have met him.’
Lord Ickenham gasped.
‘Not the pinhead Twistleton?’
Something of the chill which hat-raising strangers usually induced crept into Hermione’s manner.
‘His name is Reginald Twistleton,’ she said, allowing her eyes to flash for a moment. ‘I am sorry you consider him a pinhead.’
‘My dear girl, it isn’t that I consider him a pinhead. Everyone considers him a pinhead. Walk into any gathering where he is a familiar figure and say to the first man you meet, “Do you know Reginald Twistleton?” and his reply, will be, “Oh, you mean the pinhead?” Good heavens, child, you mustn’t dream of marrying Reginald Twistleton. Even had you not a Bill Oakshott on your waiting list, it would be madness. How could you be happy with a man who is always getting arrested at Dog Races?’
‘What!’
‘Incessantly, you might say. And giving a false name and address.’
‘You’re talking nonsense.’
‘My dear, these are well-documented facts. If you don’t believe me, creep up behind this young Twistleton and shout “Yoo-hoo, Edwin Smith, 11, Nasturtium Road, East Dulwich!” in his ear and watch him jump. Well, I don’t know what you think, but to my mind there is something not very nice in going to Dog Races at all, for the people you meet there must be very mixed. But if a young man does go to Dog Races, I maintain that the least he can do is to keep from behaving in so disorderly a manner that he gets scooped in by the constabulary. And if you are going to try to excuse this Twistleton on the ground that he was intoxicated at the time, I can only say that I am unable to share your broad-minded outlook. No doubt he was intoxicated, but I can’t see that that makes it any better. You knew, by the way, I suppose, that he is a dipsomaniac?’
‘A what?’
‘So your father tells me.’
‘But Reginald is a teetotaller.’
‘While your eye is on him, perhaps. But only then. At other times he shifts the stuff like a vacuum cleaner. You should have been here last night. He stole down when everyone was in bed and threw a regular orgy.’
Hermione had been intending to put an end to this conversation by throwing in her clutch and driving off with a stiff word of farewell, but now she saw that she would have to start later. A girl who has been looking on the man of her choice as a pure white soul and suddenly discovers that he is about as pure and white as a stevedore’s undervest does not say ‘Oh, yes? Well, I must be off.’ She sits rigid. She gasps. She waits for more.
‘Tell me everything,’ she said.
As Lord Ickenham proceeded to do so, the grim expression on Hermione Bostock’s lovely face became intensified. If there is one thing a girl of ideals dislikes, it is to learn that she has been nursing a viper in her bosom, and that Reginald Twistleton was a Grade A viper, with all the run-of-the-mill viper’s lack of frankness and square shooting, seemed more manifest with every word that was spoken.
‘Oh!’ she said.
‘Well!’ she said.
‘Go on,’ she said.
The story wore to its conclusion. Lord Ickenham ceased to speak, and Hermione sat gazing before her with eyes of stone. She was doing something odd with her teeth which may have been that ‘grinding’ we read about.
‘Of course,’ said Lord Ickenham, ever charitable, ‘he may simply be off his head. I don’t know if you know anything of his family history, but he tells me he is the nephew of Lord Ickenham; a fact, surely, that makes one purse the lips dubiously. Do you know Lord Ickenham?’
‘Only by reputation.’
‘And what a reputation! There is a strong body of opinion which holds that he ought to have been certified years ago. I understand he is always getting flattering offers from Colney Hatch and similar establishments. And insanity so often runs in families. When I first met this young man Twistleton, I received a distinct impression that he was within a short jump of the loony bin, and that curious incident this morning, of which Bill Oakshott was telling me, has strengthened this view.’
Hermione quivered. She had not supposed that there was to be an Act Two.
‘Curious incident?’
‘It took place shortly after breakfast. Lady Bostock, going to her room, heard movements within, looked in the wardrobe and found Reginald Twistleton in it, crouching on the floor. His explanation was that he had come to borrow her lipstick.’
Hermione gripped her motor licence till the knuckles stood out white under the strain. Act One had stirred her profoundly, but Act Two had topped it.
In speaking of the dislike which high-principled gir
ls have for vipers, we omitted to mention that it becomes still more pronounced when they discover that they use lipstick. That this erstwhile idol of hers should have feet of clay was bad, but that in addition to those feet of clay he should have, at the other end, a mouth that apparently needed touching up from time to time was the pay-off. People still speak of the great market crash of 1929, asking you with a shudder if you remember the way US Steel and Montgomery Ward hit the chutes during the month of October: but in that celebrated devaluation of once gilt-edged shares there was nothing comparable to the swift and dizzy descent at this moment of Twistleton Preferred.
Hermione’s teeth came together with a click.
‘I shall have a talk with Reginald!’
‘I should. I think you owe it to yourself to demand an explanation. One wonders if Reginald Twistleton knows the difference between right and wrong.’
‘I’ll tell him,’ said Hermione.
Lord Ickenham watched her drive off, well content with the way she stepped on the gas. He liked to see her hurrying to the tryst like that. The right spirit, he considered. He climbed the five-barred gate at the side of the road and lowered himself on to the scented grass beyond it. His eyes fixed on the cloudless sky, he thought how pleasant it was to spread sweetness and light and how fortunate he ought to reckon himself that he had been granted this afternoon such ample opportunity of doing so. If for an instant a pang of pity passed through him as he pictured the meeting between Pongo and this incandescent girl, he suppressed it. Pongo — if he survived — would surely feel nothing but a tender gratitude towards an uncle who had laboured so zealously on his behalf. A drowsiness stole over him, and his eyelids closed in sleep.
Hermione, meanwhile, had reached the house and come to a halt outside its front door with a grinding of brakes and a churning of gravel. And she was about to enter, when from the room to her left she heard her father’s voice.
‘GET OUT!’ it was saying, and a moment later Constable Potter emerged, looking like a policeman who has passed through the furnace. She went to the window.
‘Father,’ she said, ‘do you know where Reginald is?’
‘No.’
‘I want to see him.’
‘Why?’ asked Sir Aylmer, as if feeling that such a desire was morbid.
‘I intend,’ said Hermione, once more grinding her teeth, ‘to break off our engagement. ‘A slender figure pacing the tennis lawn caught her eye. She hastened towards it, little jets of flame shooting from her nostrils.
Down at the Bull’s Head, the girl Myrtle, her conversation with her uncle concluded, had returned to her post in the saloon bar. The gentleman was still at the counter, staring fixedly at the empty tankard, but he was alone.
‘Hullo,’ she said disappointedly, for she had been hoping to hear more about Brazil, where might is right and the strong man comes into his own. ‘Has Major Plank hopped it?’
The gentleman nodded moodily. A shrewder observer than the barmaid would have sensed that the subject of Major Plank was distasteful to him.
‘Did he tell you about the puma? No? Well, it was very interesting. It was where he was threading his way through this trackless forest, gathering Brazil nuts, when all of a sudden what should come along but this puma. Pardon?’
The gentleman, who beneath his breath had damned and blasted the puma, did not repeat his observation, but asked for a pint of bitter.
‘Would have upset me, I confess,’ proceeded the barmaid. ‘Yessir, I don’t mind saying I’d have been scared stiff. Because pumas jump on the back of your neck and chew you, which you can’t say is pleasant. But Major Plank’s what I might call intrepid. He had his gun and his trusty native bearer —The gentleman repeated his request for bitter in a voice so forceful that it compelled attention. Haughtily, for his tone had offended her, the barmaid pulled the beer handle and delivered the goods, and the gentleman, having drunk deeply, said ‘Ha!’ The barmaid said nothing. She continued piqued.
But pique is never enough to keep a barmaid silent for long. Presently, having in the meantime polished a few glasses in a marked manner, she resumed the conversation, this time selecting a topic less calculated to inflame the passions.
‘Uncle John’s in a rare old state.’
‘Whose Uncle John?’
‘My Uncle John. The landlord here. Did you hear him shouting just now?’
The gentleman, mellowed by beer, indicated with an approach to amiability that Jno. Humphrey’s agitation had not escaped his notice. Yes, he said, he had heard him shouting just now.
‘So I should think. You could have heard him at Land’s End. All of a doodah, he is. I must begin by telling you,’ said the barmaid, falling easily into her stride, ‘that there’s a big fete coming on here soon. It’s an annual fete, by which I mean that it comes on once a year. And one of the things that happens at this annual fete is a bonny baby competition. Pardon?’
The gentleman said he had not spoken.
‘A bonny baby competition,’ resumed the barmaid. ‘By which I mean a competition for bonny babies. If you’ve got a bonny baby, I mean to say, you enter it in this bonny baby competition, and if the judge thinks your bonny baby is a bonnier baby than the other bonny babies, it gets the prize. If you see what I mean?’
The gentleman said he saw what she meant.
‘Well, Uncle John had entered his little Wilfred and was fully expecting to cop. In fact, he had as much as a hundred bottles of beer on him at eight to one with sportsmen in the village. And now what happens?’
The gentlemen said he couldn’t imagine.
‘Why, Mr Brotherhood, the curate, goes and gets the measles, and the germs spread hither and thither, and now there’s so many gone down with it that the Vicar says it isn’t safe to have the bonny baby competition, so it’s off.’
She paused, well satisfied with the reception of her tale. Her audience might have been hard to grip with anecdotes of Major Plank among the pumas, but he had responded admirably to this simpler narrative of English village life. Though oddly, considering that the story was in its essence a tragic one, the emotion under which he was labouring seemed to be joy. Quite a sunny look had come into his eyes, as if weights had been removed from his mind.
‘Off,’ said the barmaid. ‘By which I mean that it won’t take place. So all bets are null and void, as the expression is, and Uncle John won’t get his bottles of beer.’
‘Too bad,’ said the gentleman. ‘Can you direct me to Ashenden Manor?’
‘Straight along, turning to the right as you leave the door.’
‘Thank you,’ said the gentleman.
13
That Constable Potter, having returned to his cottage and changed into a dry uniform should then have proceeded without delay to Ashenden Manor to see Sir Aylmer Bostock was only what might have been expected. Sir Aylmer was the chairman of the local bench of magistrates, and he looked upon him as his natural protector. The waters of the pond had scarcely closed over his head before he was saying to himself that here was something to which the big chiefs attention would have to be drawn.
He was unaware that in seeking an audience at this particular time he was doing something virtually tantamount to stirring up a bilious tiger with a short stick. No warning voice whispered in his ear. ‘Have a care, Potter!’ adding that as the result of having been compelled to withdraw a suit for damages to which he had been looking forward with bright anticipation for weeks his superior’s soul was a bubbling maelstrom of black malignity and that he was far more likely to bite a policeman in the leg than to listen patiently to his tales of woe.
The realization that this was so came, however, almost immediately: He had been speaking for perhaps a minute when Sir Aylmer, interrupting him, put a question.
‘Are you tight, you bloodstained Potter?’ asked Sir Aylmer, regarding him with a sort of frenzied loathing. When a man has come to his collection room to be alone with his grief, to brood on the shattering of his hopes and to think how
sweet life might have been had he had one of those meek, old-fashioned daughters who used to say ‘Yes, papa!’ the last thing he wants is policemen clumping in with complicated stories. ‘What on earth are you talking about? I can’t make head or tail of it.’
Constable Potter was surprised. He was not conscious of having been obscure. It also came as a shock to him to discover that he had misinterpreted the twitching of his audience’s limbs and the red glare in that audience’s eye. He had been attributing these phenomena to the natural horror of a good man who hears from another good man of outrages committed on his, the second good man’s, person and it seemed now that he had been mistaken.
‘It’s with ref. to this aggravated assault, sir.’
‘What aggravated assault?’
‘The one I’m telling you about, sir. I was assaulted by the duck pond.’
The suspicion that the speaker had been drinking grew in Sir Aylmer’s mind. Even Reginald Twistleton at the height of one of his midnight orgies might have hesitated, he felt, to make a statement like that.
‘By the duck pond?’ he echoed, his eyes widening.
‘Yes, sir.’
‘How the devil can you be assaulted by a duck pond?’
Constable Potter saw where the misunderstanding had arisen. The English language is full of these pitfalls.
‘When I said “by the duck pond”, I didn’t mean “by the duck pond”, I meant “by the duck pond”. That is to say,’ proceeded Constable Potter, speaking just in time, ‘“near” or “adjacent to”, in fact “on the edge of’. I was the victim of an aggravated assault on the edge of the duck pond, sir. Somebody pushed me in.’
‘Pushed you in?’
‘Pushed me in, sir. Like as it might have been someone what had a grudge against me.’