Major Plank said he was dashed.
‘It’s that ghastly moustache that misled me,’ he explained. ‘If you go about the place behind a whacking great white moustache, you can’t blame people for taking you for a centenarian. Well, nice to see you again, Mugsy, and all that, but, cutting the guff, I came here on business. Plank’s my name. ‘‘Plank!’
‘Brabazon-Plank. You may remember me at school. I’ve just discovered that that raving lunatic, Barmy Twistleton — Lord Ickenham he calls himself now — has been passing himself off as me under your roof, and it’s got to stop. I don’t know what made him do it, and I don’t care, the point is I’ll be damned if I’m going to have people thinking that Barmy Twistleton is me. Good God! How would you like it yourself?’
There had been an instant, just after the words, ‘Plank’s my name,’ when Sir Aylmer had given a quick and extraordinarily realistic impersonation of a harpooned whale, shaking from stem to stern as if a barb had entered his flesh. But as the speaker continued, this had given place to a frozen calm, the dangerous calm that heralds the storm.
‘I can tell you what made him do it,’ he said, allowing his eyes to play upon Bill like flame-throwers. ‘He wished to be of assistance to my nephew here. We are holding our annual village fete shortly, and one of its features is a contest for bonny babies. My nephew was to have acted as judge.’
‘Barmy told me he was going to be the judge.’
‘That was the latest arrangement. My nephew persuaded him to take his place.’
‘Very sensible of you, Bill,’ said Major Plank cordially. ‘Dashed dangerous things, these baby contests. The little beasts are bad enough themselves, but it’s the mothers you want to watch out for. Look,’ he said, baring his leg and indicating a cicatrice on the calf. ‘That’s what I got once in Peru for being fool enough to let myself be talked into judging a competition for bonny babies. The mother of one of the Hon. Mentions got after me with a native dagger.’
‘The problem then arose,’ proceeded Sir Aylmer, still speaking evenly and spacing his words with care, ‘of how to introduce Lord Ickenham into my house. He was well aware that I would never allow him to enter my house, if I knew who he was. So he said he was Major Brabazon-Plank, the explorer, and my nephew endorsed this statement. What do you mean,’ roared Sir Aylmer, suddenly abandoning the calm, judicial method and becoming a thing of fire and fury, ‘what do you mean, you infernal young scallywag, by introducing impostors into my house?’
He would have spoken further, for it was obvious that the greater part of his music was still in him, but at this moment Bill exploded.
A good deal is always required to change a mental attitude which has endured for a number of years. From early boyhood Bill Oakshott had regarded this uncle of his with respectful awe, much as a nervous young prehistoric man might have regarded the leader of his tribe. He had quailed before his wrath, listened obsequiously to his stories, done all that lay in his power to humour him. And had this scene taken place at a time when he was in normal mood, there is little doubt that he would have folded like an accordion and allowed himself to be manhandled without protest.
But Bill was not in normal mood. His soul was seething in rebellion like a cistern struck by a thunderbolt. The interview with Hermione had left him raw and wincing. The information that she regarded him as a sheep had dropped vitriol on the wounds. And now, not once but three times, this white-moustached cuckoo in the nest had alluded to Ashenden Manor as ‘my house’. At these emotional moments there is always something, generally trivial in itself, which fulfils the function of the last straw, and with Bill now it was this description of Ashenden Manor.
In the automatic, barely conscious fashion of the Englishman at tea time he had been continuing to eat and drink throughout his uncle’s exposition, and for an instant a muffin prevented him expressing his views. He swallowed it, and was at liberty to proceed.
‘“My house?”‘ he said. ‘I like that. Where do you get that “my house” stuff?’
Sir Aylmer said that that was not the point, and was starting to indicate once more what the point was, when he was swept away as if by a tidal wave.
‘“My house!”‘ repeated Bill, choking on the words like one who chokes upon a muffin. ‘Of all the crust! Of all the nerve! It’s about time, Uncle Aylmer, that we got this thing cleared up about who this ruddy house belongs to. Let’s do it now.’
‘Yes, let’s,’ said Major Plank, interested. A man with five sisters and seven aunts, he was well versed in family rows and thought that this one promised to be in the first rank and wanted pushing along. ‘Whose house is it?’
‘Mine,’ thundered Bill. ‘Mine. Mine. Mine. Mine. Mine.’
‘I see,’ said Major Plank, getting his drift. ‘Yours. Then where does Mugsy come in?’
‘He planted himself here when I was a mere kid, unable to do anything about it. I was only sixteen when my father died, and he barged over from Cheltenham and got into the woodwork.’
‘What happened when you came of age?’
‘Nothing. He stuck on.’
‘You should have booted him out.’
‘Of course I should.’
‘That was the moment.’
‘Yes.’
‘Why didn’t you?’
‘I hadn’t the heart.’
‘Mistaken kindness.’
‘Well, I’m going to do it now. I’ve had enough of this business of being a … what’s the word?’
‘Fathead?’
‘Cipher in the home. I’m sick and tired of being a cipher in the home. You can jolly well clear out, Uncle Aylmer. You understand me? Buzz off. Where you buzz to, I don’t care, but buzz. Go back to Cheltenham, if you like. Or Bexhill.’
‘Or Bognor Regis,’ suggested Major Plank.
‘Or Bognor Regis. Go anywhere you like, but you’re not going to stay here. Is that clear?’
‘Quite clear,’ said Major Plank. ‘Very well put.’
‘Right,’ said Bill.
He strode out through the french window, and Major Plank helped himself to a muffin.
‘Nice chap, Bill,’ he said. ‘I like a young fellow who knows his own mind. Extraordinarily good muffins, these, Mugsy. I’ll have another.’
Emerging through the french window, Bill passed along the terrace, walking rapidly towards the spot where the drive began. His eyes glowed. He was breathing stertorously.
The appetite grows by what it feeds on. So far from soothing him and restoring him to everyday placidity, his throwing off of the shackles had left Bill Oakshott in a mood for fresh encounters. He had tasted blood, and wanted more. It is often so with quiet young men who at long last assert themselves.
He was in the frame of mind when he would have liked to meet Joe Louis and pick a quarrel with him, and as he turned the corner and came into the drive there caught his eye something which seemed to have been sent in direct answer to prayer.
It was not Joe Louis, but it was the next best thing. What he had seen was a stout young man with a pink nose and horn-rimmed spectacles in conversation with Hermione Bostock. And just as he beheld him this young man suddenly folded Hermione in his embrace and started to kiss her.
Bill broke into a gallop, the glow in his eyes intensified, the stertorousness of his breathing still more marked. His general mental attitude was that of the war-horse which said ‘Ha!’ among the trumpets.
14
It is never easy for a high-strung young man whose whole future as a publisher of the book beautiful is being decided at a country house to sit in an inn two miles from that house, waiting patiently for news to be brought to him from the front. With each long minute that goes by his nervousness increases. The limbs twitch, the eyeballs roll, the illusion that there are ants in his pants becomes more and more pronounced, until eventually the urge to be closer to the centre of things grows so imperious that he yields to it.
That was why Otis Painter had been absent from the Bull’s Head wh
en Hermione arrived there. He had started to walk to Ashenden Manor. Like Edith of the swan’s neck after the Battle of Hastings, he wanted to find out what had been going on.
When we say that Otis had started to walk to Ashenden Manor, it would be more correct to put it that he thought he had; in actual fact, having got his instructions twisted, he had turned to the left instead of to the right on leaving the inn, and it was only after he had proceeded a mile and three quarters through delightful country that he discovered that though he was improving his figure and getting lots of pure air into his lungs, he was diminishing his chances of reaching his destination with every step that he took.
Returning to the Bull’s Head, he had borrowed a bicycle from the boy who cleaned the boots, a courteous and obliging lad of the name of Erbut with blacking all over his face, and after a couple of unpleasant spills, for it was many years since he had cycled and the old skill had rather deserted him, had found himself at the top of the drive. There, feeling that this was as far as it was prudent to penetrate into territory where there was a grave risk of meeting Sir Aylmer Bostock, he deposited his machine behind a tree, concealed himself in the bushes and resumed his waiting. And presently Hermione appeared, walking briskly.
As she drew near and he was enabled to get a clear view of her, his heart sank, for he could see that her lips were tightly set, her bosom heaving and her eyes bright and stormy. She looked, in a word, like a daughter who, approaching her father in the matter of withdrawing legal actions against publishers, has come up against something too hot to handle.
Actually, of course, Hermione’s appearance was simply the normal appearance of a girl who has just been ticking off a viper. After a dust-up with a viper the female lips always become tightly set, and it is rarely that the bosom does not heave. But Otis did not know this, and it was with a mind filled with the gloomiest forebodings that he stepped from his hiding place. ‘Here comes the bad news,’ he was saying to himself.
‘Well?’ he said, uttering the monosyllable loudly and raspingly, as so often happens when the nerves are over-strained.
The briskness of her pace had taken Hermione past him, and it was from behind that he had addressed her. At the sound of a voice suddenly splitting the welkin where no voice should have been she left the ground in an upward direction and came to earth annoyed and ruffled.
‘I wish you wouldn’t pop out of bushes like that,’ she said with a good deal of asperity.
Otis was too agitated to go into the niceties of etiquette and procedure.
‘What happened?’ he asked.
‘I bit my tongue.’
‘I mean,’ said Otis, clicking his, ‘when you saw your father.’
Hermione mastered her emotion. Her tongue was still paining her, but she had remembered that this man was a publisher who believed in column spreads in all the literate Sunday papers.
‘Oh, yes,’ she said.
The reply dissatisfied Otis. It seemed to him to lack lucidity, and lucidity was what he desired — or, as a literate Sunday paper would have put it, desiderated.
‘What do you mean, Oh, yes? What did he say?’
Hermione’s composure was now restored. She still disapproved of her sponsor’s practice of popping out of bushes and speaking like a foghorn down the back of her neck, but was willing to let bygones be bygones.
‘It’s quite all right, Mr Painter,’ she said, smiling kindly upon Otis. ‘Father has withdrawn the suit.’
Otis reeled.
‘He has?’
‘Yes.’
‘Gee!’ said Otis, and it was at this point that he folded Hermione in his embrace and started to kiss her.
The last thing we desire being to cast aspersions on publishers, a most respectable class of men, we hasten to say that behaviour of this kind is very unusual with these fine fellows. Statistics show that the number of authoresses kissed annually by publishers is so small that, if placed end to end, they would reach scarcely any distance. Otis’s action was quite exceptional, and Hodder and Stoughton, had they observed it, would have looked askance. So would Jonathan Cape. And we think we speak for Heinemann, Macmillan, Benn, Gollancz and Herbert Jenkins Ltd when we say that they, too, would have been sickened by the spectacle.
In defence of Otis there are several extenuating points to be urged. In the first place, his relief was so intense and his happiness so profound that he had to kiss something. In the second place, Hermione was a very beautiful girl (not that that would have weighed with Faber and Faber) and she had smiled upon him very kindly. And, finally, we cannot judge men who have lived on the left bank of the Seine by the same standards which we apply to those whose home is in London. If Eyre and Spottiswoode had taken a flat in the Rue Jacob, within easy reach of the Boul’ Mich’, they would have been surprised how quickly they would have forgotten the lessons they had learned at their mother’s knee.
It was unfortunate that none of these arguments presented themselves to Bill Oakshott as he turned the corner. In Otis Painter he saw just another libertine, flitting from flower to flower and sipping, and we are already familiar with his prejudice against libertines. His impulse on seeing one, we recall, was to pull his head off at the roots and rip his insides out with his bare hands, and it was with this procedure in mind that he now advanced on the entwined pair. He gripped Otis by the coat collar and tore him from the clinch, and he would almost certainly have started to detach his head, had not Hermione uttered a piercing cry.
‘Don’t kill him, Bill! He’s my publisher.’
And then, as she saw him hesitate, she added:
‘He’s doing my next three books and giving me twenty per cent rising to twenty-five above three thousand.’
It was enough. Practically berserk though Bill was, he could still reason, and reason told him that publishers of this type must be nursed along rather than disembowelled. Hermione’s literary career was as dear to him as to herself, and he knew that he could never forgive himself if he jeopardized it by eviscerating a man capable of planning contracts on these spacious lines. He released Otis, who tottered back against a tree and stood there panting and polishing his spectacles.
Bill, too, was panting. His breath came in loud gasps as he strode up to Hermione and grabbed her by the wrist. There was in his demeanour now no trace of that craven diffidence which had marked it during their previous interview in the hall. Since then William Oakshott, with a victory over a tyrant under his belt, had become a changed man, and the man he had changed into was a sort of composite of James Cagney and Attila the Hun. He felt strong and masterful and in the best possible vein for trying out the Ickenham system. Otis Painter, peering at him through his spectacles, which he had now resumed, was reminded of a Parisian inspecteur who had once arrested him at the Quatz Arts Ball.
Nor was Hermione unimpressed. She was now being waggled about, and she found the process, though physically unpleasant, giving her a thrill of ecstasy.
Like all very beautiful girls, Hermione Bostock had received in her time a great deal of homage from the other sex. For years she had been moving in a world of men who frisked obsequiously about her and curled up like carbon paper if she spoke crossly to them, and she had become surfeited with male worship. Even when accepting Pongo’s proposal she had yearned secretly for something rough and tough with a nasty eye and the soul of a second mate of a tramp steamer. And in the last quarter where she would have thought of looking she had found him. She had always been fond of Bill, but in an indulgent, almost contemptuous fashion, regarding him, as she had once mentioned to her father, as a sheep. And now the sheep, casting off its clothing, had revealed itself as one of the wolves and now the worst of them.
Little wonder that Hermione Bostock, as Bill having waggled her about, clasped her to his bosom and showered kisses on her upturned face, felt that here was the man she had been looking for since she first read The Way of an Eagle.
‘My mate!’ said Bill. Then, speaking from between clenched teeth, ??
?Hermione!’
‘Yes, Bill?’
‘You’re going to marry me. ‘‘Yes, Bill.’
‘That’s clearly understood, is it?’
‘Yes, Bill.’
‘No more fooling about with these Pongos and what not. ‘‘No, Bill.’
‘Right,’ said the dominant male. He turned to Otis, who had been looking on at the scene with a sort of nostalgia, for it had reminded him of the old, happy days on the left bank of the Seine. ‘So you’re going to publish her books, are you?’
‘Yes,’ said Otis eagerly. He wanted there to be no mistake about this. ‘All of them.’
‘Giving her twenty per cent rising to twenty-five above three thousand?’
‘Yes.’
‘Why not a straight twenty-five?’ said Bill, and Otis agreed that that would be much better. He had been on the point, he said, of suggesting it himself.
‘Fine,’ said Bill. ‘Well, come along in, both of you, and have some tea.’
Hermione regretfully shook her head.
‘I can’t, darling. I must be getting back to London. Mother has been waiting for me at my flat since one o’clock, and she may be wondering what has become of me. I shall have to drive like the wind. Can I give you a lift, Mr Painter?’
Otis shuddered.
‘I guess I’ll go by train.’
‘You’ll find it slow.’
‘I like it slow.’
‘Very well. Goodbye, darling.’
‘Goodbye,’ said Bill. ‘I’ll be up in London tomorrow.
‘Splendid. Come and see me to the car. I left it outside the house.’
Otis remained, leaning against his tree. He felt a little faint, but very happy. Presently the two-seater, with Hermione bent over the wheel, whizzed round the corner and passed him at a speed which made him close his eyes and say to himself ‘There but for the grace of God goes Otis Painter.’ When he opened them again, he saw Bill approaching.
‘Why not thirty?’ said Bill. ‘Pardon?’
‘Per cent. For her books. Not twenty-five.’