‘I’ll tell you what’s the matter with her. She goes on at him about how he mustn’t leave the Force. It’s “Don’t you do it, Harold,” and “Don’t you let Elsie talk you into acting against your true interests,” all the time. I haven’t any patience.’
Pongo concentrated tensely.
‘Let me see if I’ve got this straight,’ he said. ‘You want him to turn in his boots and truncheon? To cease, in a word, to be a copper?’
‘R.’
‘But his sister doesn’t. Yes, I get the set-up. Why do you want him to turn in his boots and truncheon?’ asked Pongo. A man who has been reading for the Bar for some years gets into the way of putting the pertinent question.
Elsie Bean seemed surprised that such a question should have been considered necessary.
‘Well, wouldn’t you? If you was a girl, would you like to be married to a policeman? Feeling your old man was hated by all. If I went home to Bottleton East and told my family I was going to get spliced to a copper, they’d have a fit. A nice thing for my brother Bert to hear, when he comes out in September.’
Pongo nodded intelligently. Until now, having supposed his companion to be a local product, he had failed to grasp the nub, but her last words made everything clear. He could quite see how a London girl, especially a child of the notoriously rather vivacious quarter of Bottleton East, might shrink from linking her lot with that of a professional tapper on shoulders and grasper of coat collars. In addition to this brother Bert — at the moment, it appeared, unhappily no longer with us — there were no doubt a number of Uncle Herbs and Cousin Georges in her entourage who, were she to commit such a mésalliance, would consider, and rightly, that she had inflicted a blot on the Bean escutcheon.
‘I see what you mean,’ he said. ‘But what could he do if he resigned his portfolio? Not easy to find jobs nowadays.’
‘I want him to buy a pub. He’s got three hundred pounds. He won a football pool last winter.’
‘The lucky stiff.’
‘But he’s scared of that sister of his, and I can’t persuade him. “Now, listen, Harold,” I keep saying, but he just hums and haws and chews his moustache. Oh, well,’ said Elsie philosophically, ‘I suppose it’ll all come out in the wash. What’s that mess on the floor?’
‘It’s what’s left of a sort of gadget I happened to drop.’
‘Does he know about it?’
‘Oh, yes. The topic came up.’
‘I wonder he didn’t chew your head off.’
‘He did look for a moment as if he were toying with some such idea. Rather a hard nut, what?’
‘He’s an overbearing dishpot,’ said Elsie Bean.
Pongo wandered out into the hall. He had about as much as he required of the collection of African curios for the time being, and he wanted to pace up and down and ponder. He had already formed a reasonably accurate estimate of Sir Aylmer Bostock’s character, but it was interesting to find it confirmed by the woman who knew.
An overbearing dishpot? The words had a disagreeable sound. His attitude towards overbearing dishpots resembled that of his companion’s circle in Bottleton East towards officers of the Law. He disliked and feared them. It began to look to him as if union with Hermione Bostock, good though it might be in itself, carried with it certain disadvantages which wanted thinking over.
‘And Lady Bostock?’ he said. ‘She flitted only briefly through my life, but she struck me as being slightly less of a man-eater.’
‘Yes, she’s better than what he is,’ agreed Elsie Bean. ‘But the one I like is Mr William.’
‘Who would he be?’
‘Their nephew. Mr Oakshott.’
‘Oh, ah, yes. I was forgetting. I know him, or used to. Got a pink face, hasn’t he?’
‘Well, I’d call it more of a tomato-ketchup colour. Owing to the heat of the sun in them parts. He’s just come back from Brazil. He was telling me about Brazil this morning,’ said Elsie, who had lost no time in buttonholing the returned wanderer and exchanging ideas with him. ‘The natives there shoot birds with poisoned darts.’
‘Poisoned darts?’
‘R. Through blowpipes.’
Pongo was courteous, but he could not let this pass. Though it was some time since he had boned up on his Brazil, memories of ‘The Boy Explorers Up the Amazon’ still lingered in his mind.
‘Not poisoned darts.’
‘That’s what Mr William told me.’
‘He was pulling your leg. They keep those for their wives’ relations. Use your intelligence, my dear old housemaid. When a Brazilian native shoots a bird, he does it with a purpose. He intends to employ that bird subsequently in broiled or fricassee form. Obviously, then, if he soaked it with a poisoned dart, he would be defeating his own ends, because no sooner had he bitten into the liver wing than he would kick the bucket in awful agonies. And Brazilian natives, while they may be asses, are not silly asses. If you really want to know how they shoot birds, I will tell you. They fashion a rude sling — thus,’ said Pongo, taking out his handkerchief and unfolding it. ‘They then look about them for a handy projectile, as it might be this paperweight, and stuff it into the rude sling. This done, they whirl the contraption round their heads and…. Oh, my God! Where did that one go?’
It had not been his intention to give a practical demonstration. He had planned to stop short of the actual discharge of the projectile, merely indicating its effects verbally. But artistic enthusiasm had carried him too far. A rending crash, and something white in the shadows at the end of the hall was lying in fragments.
‘Coo!’ said Elsie Bean, awed. ‘You aren’t half breaking up the home, are you? You’ll catch it when His Nibs gets back.’
For the third time since he had entered this house of terror, Pongo’s brow grew warm and damp. With that get-together of theirs over the broken what-not still green in his memory, it seemed to him only too sickeningly certain that he would catch it when His Nibs got back.
‘What was it?’ he quavered, rightly speaking of the object in the past tense.
‘It’s a sort of sawn-off statue like, that he had presented to him when he give up being Governor of that dog’s island out in Africa that he used to be Governor of. A bust, cook says it’s called. He thinks the world of it. The other morning he happened to come along while I was giving it a bit of a dusting, and you ought to have heard him go on, just because I kind of rocked it a little. “Be careful, girl! Be careful, girl! Mind what you’re doing, my good girl!” Coo!’
Pongo’s brow grew damper. A stylist would now have described it as beaded. And simultaneously he found himself chilled to the bone. He was a human replica of one of those peculiar puddings which lure the diner on into supposing that he is biting into a hot soufflé and then suddenly turn right around and become ice-cream in the middle.
Matters were even worse, he perceived, than he had feared. This was not one of those minor breakages which get passed off with a light apology on the one side and a jolly laugh on the other. It was as if Sir Aylmer Bostock had had a favourite child on whom he doted and he, Pongo, had socked that child on the occiput and laid it out good and proper. And coming right on top of the what-not misadventure, too! What would be the effect on his temperamental host of this second and possibly even more wrath-provoking outrage?
‘Golly!’ he moaned, sagging at the knees. ‘This is a nice bit of box fruit. Advise me, young Bean. What do I do for the best, do you think?’
It may be that Bottleton East produces an exceptionally quick-witted type of girl, or perhaps all women are like that. At any rate, Elsie Bean, with scarcely a pause for thought, provided the solution hot off the griddle.
‘Well, look,’ she said. ‘It’s kind of dark in that corner, so maybe he won’t miss his old bust for a bit. He’s short-sighted, I know, and he won’t wear specs because he thinks they’d make him look silly. Jane heard them talking about it at dinner. If I was you, I’d hop into that car of yours and drive lickerty-split to London and
get another bust. And then you drive back and stick it up. Ten to one he won’t notice nothing.’
For an instant Pongo’s numbed brain was incapable of following her reasoning. Then the mists cleared, and he saw that it was red-hot stuff. This girl had found the way.
Drive lickerty-split to London? No need to do that. He could procure the substitute a dashed sight nearer than London. At Ickenham Hall, to be precise. His mind shot back to last night’s dinner-table…. Uncle Fred jerking his thumb at an object in the corner of the room and saying it was a bust which Sally had brought down and left in his charge, and himself — how ironical it seemed now — giving the thing a brief and uninterested glance. It wouldn’t be an uninterested glance he would be giving it when he saw it again.
His spirits soared. Ickenham Hall was only a dozen miles away, and he had an owner-driver’s touching faith in the ability of his Buffy-Porson to do a dozen miles, if pushed, in about three minutes and a quarter. He could be there and back and have the understudy on its pedestal long before his host had finished with the Vicar.
He beamed upon Elsie Bean.
‘That’s the set-up. I’ll go and get the car.’
‘I would.’
‘You, meanwhile, might be putting in a bit of earnest brush-and-pan work.’
‘Right ho!’
‘Fine. Great. Capital. Splendid,’ said Pongo, and raced for the stables.
Elsie Bean, her errand of mercy concluded, was standing on the front steps when he drove up. He was conscious, as he saw her, of a twinge of remorse, for it had just come to him that he had churlishly omitted to chuck her so much as a word of thanks for her splendid resourcefulness.
‘I say,’ he said, ‘I forgot to mention it in the swirl and rush of recent events, but I’m most frightfully obliged to you for the very sporting way you’ve rallied round and saved me from the fate that is worse than death — viz,’ explained Pongo, ‘getting glared at by that goggle—eyed old Jack the Ripper with the lip fungus.’
Elsie Bean said she was only too pleased, to be sure, and he took her hand in his and pressed it.
‘But for you I should have been in the soup and going down for the third time. I owe you more than words can tell.’
He was still pressing her hand, and from that to kissing her in a grateful and brotherly manner was but a short step. He took it, and Bill Oakshott, coming round the corner after one of the long walks with which he was endeavouring these days to allay the pangs of frustrated love, was able to observe the courteous gesture from start to finish.
Pongo sprang into the car with a lissom bound, waved his hand and drove off, and Bill stared after him, stunned. Pongo belonged to the type of man which changes very little in appearance with the passage of the years, and he recognized him immediately. Still, to make sure ….
‘Wasn’t that Mr Twistleton?’ he enquired of Elsie Bean.
‘Yes, sir,’ said Elsie composedly. She had no inkling of the turmoil in his soul, and would have been astounded to learn that anyone was taking exception to that kiss. In Bottleton East everybody kisses everybody else as a matter of course, like the early Christians. ‘He says you were wrong about the natives, Mr William.’
‘The what?’
‘Those natives in Brazil. They don’t shoot birds with poisoned darts, only their wives’ relations. They use rude slings.’
With an effort that shook his powerful frame to its foundations Bill Oakshott contrived to keep from saying something ruder about Brazilian natives than any sling fashioned by them. There was no room in his thoughts for Brazilian natives. All the available space was occupied by Pongo.
So this, he was saying to himself, was the man to whom Hermione had entrusted her happiness; a libertine who, once the Don Juan of his dancing class, now went about kissing housemaids on doorsteps. How right, how unerringly right, old Ickenham had been. Can the leopard change his spots, he had speculated. This leopard didn’t even seem to want to.
Gosh! thought Bill, aghast at the stark horror of the thing. A minor point presented itself.
‘Where’s he off to?’ he asked, puzzled.
‘London, sir.’
‘London?’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘But he’s only just arrived.’ ‘Yes, sir.’
‘Did he say why he was going to London?’
Elsie Bean was a good accomplice, cautious, reliable, on the alert against verbal slips. ‘No, sir. He just said “Coo! I think I’ll go to London,” and popped off.’
Bill Oakshott drew a deep breath. It seemed to him that in the years since he had seen: him last, his old friend, never very strong in the head, have become absolutely non compos. Do balanced men drive to country houses and immediately upon arrival say ‘Coo! I think I’ll go to London,’ and drive off again? They certainly do not.
His heart, as he filled his pipe, was heavy. Sane libertines, he was thinking, are bad enough, but loony libertines are the limit.
4
It was at a quarter to eight that evening that Lord Ickenham, after a pleasant journey to London in his car and a bath and change at his club, arrived in Budge Street, Chelsea, to pick up Sally Painter and take her to dinner.
Budge Street, Chelsea, in the heart of London’s artistic quarter, is, like so many streets in the hearts of artistic quarters, dark, dirty, dingy and depressing. Its residents would appear to be great readers and very fond of fruit, for tattered newspapers can always be found fluttering about its sidewalks and old banana skins, cores of apples, plum stones and squashed strawberries lying in large quantities in its gutters. Its cats are stringy, hard-boiled cats, who look as if they were contemplating, or had just finished perpetrating, a series of murders of the more brutal type.
It was a bit of luck, accordingly, for this dishevelled thoroughfare to be toned up by Lord Ickenham’s ornamental presence. With his well-cut clothes and distinguished deportment he lent to the scene a suggestion of the enclosure at Ascot on Cup Day.
And he had not been there long, strolling up and down, when Budge Street had another slice of good fortune. Round the corner from the King’s Road there came hurrying a small, alert girl in beige, whose arrival intensified the Ascot note. Nobody, not even Pongo at the very height of that unfortunate discussion about the tint of his liver, had ever attempted to deny that Sally Painter was pretty: and even if she had not been, there was a jauntiness in her carriage which would have gone far to create that illusion.
To Lord Ickenham she seemed like some spirit of the summer day. Watching her as she paused to tickle a passing cat and noting how under the treatment the cat became in an instant a better, more idealistic cat, his heart went out to her.
‘Hoy!’ he cried paternally, and she came running up, floating into his arms like a columbine.
‘I hope I haven’t kept you waiting, Uncle Fred. I had to see a man about a bust.’
‘Not at all,’ said Lord Ickenham. Odd, he was thinking, how everybody seemed to be seeing men about busts today. It was only a few hours since Pongo had come charging into his study, clamouring for one. ‘Always see men about busts. It is the secret of a happy and successful life.’
Sally linked her arm in his, and gave it a squeeze.
‘It’s lovely seeing you again, angel.’
‘I am always well worth looking at.’
‘How wonderful of you to come. And how brave! How did you manage to sneak away?’
‘What extraordinary verbs you employ, child.’
‘Well, didn’t Aunt Jane say she would scalp you with a blunt knife next time you were AWOL?’
‘In her playful way she did say something of the sort. Odd, that craving of hers to keep me vegetating in the country. But your honorary Aunt Jane is at the moment on her way to the West Indies. This has eased the situation a good deal. I thought it a good opportunity of broadening my mind.’
‘Or playing hooky.’
‘That is another way of putting it, of course. Well, let’s find a taxi and go and get som
e dinner. There’s one,’ said Lord Ickenham, as they turned the corner. ‘Hop in. Barribault’s,’ he said to the driver, and Sally closed her eyes in a sort of ecstasy. A girl who as a rule dined sparingly in Soho, she found enchantment in the mere name of London’s premier restaurant.
‘Barribault’s? We’re not dressed.’
‘Grill room. Ev. dress not oblig.’
‘But do I look smart enough?’
‘My dear, you look like Helen of Troy after a good facial.’ Sally leaned back against the cushions.
‘Barribault’s!’ she murmured.
‘We Earls step high,’ Lord Ickenham assured her. ‘The best is none too good for us.’
‘It must be great being an Oil.’
‘It’s terrific. I often lie awake at night, aching with pity for all the poor devils who aren’t.’
‘Though I suppose you know you’re an anachronistic parasite on the body of the State? Or so Otis says. He’s just become a Communist.’
‘He has, has he? Well, you can tell him from me that if he starts any nonsense of trying to hang me from a lamp-post, I shall speak very sharply to him. Doesn’t he like Earls?’
‘Not much. He thinks they’re blood-suckers.’
‘What an ass that boy is, to be sure. Where’s the harm in sucking blood? We need it, to keep us rosy. And it isn’t as if I hadn’t had to work for my little bit of gore. People see me now the dickens of a fellow with five Christian names and a coronet hanging on a peg in the hats and coats cupboard under the stairs, and they forget that I started at the bottom of the ladder. For years I was a younger son, a mere Honourable!’
‘Why have you never told me this?’
‘I hadn’t the heart to. A worm of an Hon. In Debrett, yes, but only in small print.’