'Tiger on skyline,' said the Egg.
'Complete with topper,' said the Bean. 'Draw that bead without delay, is my advice.'
'Just waiting till I can see the whites of his eyes,' said Lord Ickenham.
Pongo, whose air now was that of a man who has had it drawn to his attention that there is a ticking bomb attached to his coat-tails, repeated his stricken-duck impersonation, putting this time even more feeling into it. Only the fact that he had brilliantined them while making his toilet that morning kept his knotted and combined locks from parting and each particular hair from standing on end like quills upon the fretful porpentine.
'For heaven's sake, Uncle Fred!'
'My boy?'
'You can't pot that bird's hat!'
'Can't?' Lord Ickenham's eyebrows rose. 'A strange word to hear on the lips of one of our proud family. Did our representative at King Arthur's Round Table say "Can't" when told off by the front office to go and rescue damsels in distress from two-headed giants? When Henry the Fifth at Harfleur cried "Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more, or close the wall up with our English dead", was he damped by hearing the voice of a Twistleton in the background saying he didn't think he would be able to manage it? No! The Twistleton in question, subsequently to do well at the battle of Agincourt, snapped into it with his hair in a braid and was the life and soul of the party. But it may be that you are dubious concerning my ability Does the old skill still linger, you are asking yourself? You need have no anxiety Anything William Tell could do I can do better.'
'But it's old Bastable.'
Lord Ickenham had not failed to observe this, but the discovery did nothing to weaken his resolution. Though fond of Sir Raymond Bastable, he found much to disapprove of in him. He considered the eminent barrister pompous, arrogant and far too pleased with himself.
Nor in forming this diagnosis was he in error. There may have been men in London who thought more highly of Sir Raymond Bastable than did Sir Raymond Bastable, but they would have been hard to find, and the sense of being someone set apart from and superior to the rest of the world inevitably breeds arrogance. Sir Raymond's attitude toward those about him – his nephew Cosmo, his butler Peasemarch, his partners at bridge, the waiters at the Demosthenes and, in particular, his sister, Phoebe Wisdom, who kept house for him and was reduced by him to a blob of tearful jelly almost daily – was always that of an irritable tribal god who intends to stand no nonsense from his worshippers and is prepared, should the smoked offering fall in any way short of the highest standard, to say it with thunderbolts. To have his top hat knocked off with a Brazil nut would, in Lord Ickenham's opinion, make him a better, deeper, more lovable man.
'Yes, there he spouts,' he said.
'He's Aunt Jane's brother.'
'Half-brother is the more correct term. Still, as the wise old saying goes, half a brother is better than no bread.'
'Aunt Jane will skin you alive, if she finds out.'
'She won't find out. That is the thought that sustains me. But I must not waste time chatting with you, my dear Pongo, much as I always enjoy your conversation. I see a taxi-cab approaching, and if I do not give quick service, my quarry will be gone with the wind. From the way his nostrils are quivering as he sniffs the breeze, I am not sure that he has not already scented me.'
Narrowing his gaze, Lord Ickenham released the guided missile, little knowing, as it sped straight and true to its mark, that he was about to enrich English literature and provide another job of work for a number of deserving printers and compositors.
Yet such was indeed the case. The question of how authors come to write their books is generally one not easily answered. Milton, for instance, asked how he got the idea for Paradise Lost, would probably have replied with a vague 'Oh, I don't know, you know. These things sort of pop into one's head, don't you know,' leaving the researcher very much where he was before. But with Sir Raymond Bastable's novel Cocktail Time we are on firmer ground. It was directly inspired by the accurate catapultmanship of Pongo Twistleton's Uncle Fred.
Had his aim not been so unerring, had he failed, as he might so well have done, to allow for windage, the book would never have been written.
CHAPTER 2
Having finished his coffee and accepted the congratulations of friends and well-wishers with a modesty that became him well, the fifth Earl ('Old Sureshot') of Ickenham, accompanied by his nephew Pongo, left the club and hailed a taxi. As the cab rolled off, its destination Lord's cricket ground, Pongo, who had stiffened from head to foot like somebody in the Middle Ages on whom the local wizard had cast a spell, sat staring before him with unseeing eyes.
'What's the matter, my boy?' said Lord Ickenham, regarding him with an uncle's concern. 'You look white and shaken, like a dry martini. Something on your mind or what passes for it?'
Pongo drew a shuddering breath that seemed to come up from the soles of his feet.
'How crazy can you get, Uncle Fred?' he said dully.
Lord Ickenham could not follow him.
'Crazy? I don't understand you. Good heavens,' he said, a bizarre thought occurring to him, 'can it be that you are referring to what took place in the smoking-room just now?'
'Yes, it jolly well can!'
'It struck you as odd that I should have knocked off Raymond Bastable's topper with a Brazil nut?'
'It struck me as about as loopy a proceeding as I ever saw in my puff.'
'My dear boy, that was not loopiness, it was altruism. I was spreading sweetness and light and doing my day's kind act. You don't know Raymond Bastable, do you?'
'Only by sight.'
'He is one of those men of whom one feels instinctively that they need a Brazil nut in the topper, for while there is sterling stuff in them, it requires some sudden shock to bring it out. Therapeutic treatment the doctors call it, do they not? I am hoping that the recent nut will have changed his whole mental outlook, causing a revised and improved Raymond Bastable to rise from the ashes of his dead self. Do you know what the trouble is in this world?'
'You ought to. You've started most of it.'
'The trouble in this world,' said Lord Ickenham, ignoring the slur, 'is that so many fellows deteriorate as they grow older. Time, like an ever-rolling stream, bears all their finer qualities away, with the result that the frightfully good chap of twenty-five is changed little by little into the stinker of fifty. Thirty years ago, when he came down from Oxford, where he had been a prominent and popular member of the University rugby football team, Raymond Bastable was as bonhomous a young man as you could have wished to meet. The jovial way he would jump with both feet on the faces of opponents on the football field and the suavity of his deportment when chucked out of the Empire on Boat Race night won all hearts. Beefy, as we used to call him, was a fourteen-stone ray of sunshine in those days. And what is he now? I am still extremely fond of him and always enjoy his society, but I cannot blind myself to the fact that the passing of the years has turned him into what a mutual friend of ours – Elsie Bean, who once held office as housemaid under Sir Aylmer Bostock at Ashenden Manor – would call an overbearing dishpot. It's being at the Bar that's done it, of course.'
'How do you mean?'
'Surely it's obvious. A man can't go on year after year shouting "Chops! Gracious heavens, gentlemen, chops and tomato sauce!" and telling people that their evidence is a tissue of lies and fabrications without getting above himself. His character changes. He becomes a dishpot. What Beefy needs, of course, is a wife.'
Ah,' said Pongo, who had recently acquired one. 'Now you're talking. If he had someone like Sally—'
'Or like my own dear Jane. You can't beat the holy state, can you? When you get a wife, I often say, you've got something. It was the worst thing that could have happened to Beefy when Barbara Crowe handed him his hat.'
'Who's Barbara Crowe?'
'The one he let get away.'
'I seem to know the name.'
'I have probably mentioned it to you
. I've known her for years. She's the widow of a friend of mine who was killed in a motor accident.'
'Isn't she in the movies?'
'Certainly not. She's a junior partner in Edgar Saxby and Sons, the literary agents. Ever heard of them?'
'No.'
'Well, I don't suppose they have ever heard of you, which evens things up. Yes, Beefy was engaged to her at one time, and then I heard that it was all off. Great pity. She's lovely, she's got a wonderful sense of humour, and her golf handicap is well in single figures. Just the wife for Beefy. In addition to improving his putting, always his weak spot, she would have made him human again. But it was not to be. What did you say?'
'I said "Bad show".'
'And you could scarcely have put it more neatly. It's a tragedy. Still, let's look on the bright side. There's always a silver lining. If things are not all that one could wish on the Bastable front, they're fine in the Johnny Pearce sector. How much did I tell you about Johnny at lunch? I can't remember. Did I mention that your Aunt Jane, exercising her subtle arts, had talked Beefy Bastable into taking a five years lease on that Hammer Lodge place of his?'
'Yes, you told me that.'
And that he's engaged to a delightful girl? Belinda Farringdon, commonly known as Bunny?'
'Yes.'
'Then you're pretty well up in his affairs, and you will probably agree with me that a bright and prosperous future lies before him. Far different from that which, if your young friends at the Drones are to be believed, confronts the athletes of Harrow-on-the-Hill. But here we are at the Mecca of English cricket,' said Lord Ickenham, suspending his remarks as the cab drew up at the entrance of Lord's. 'Golly!'
'Now what?'
'If only,' said Lord Ickenham, surveying the sea of top hats before him, 'I had my catapult with me!'
They entered the ground, and Pongo, cordially invited to remain at his uncle's side, shied like a startled horse and said he would prefer to be pushing along. It was his settled policy, he explained, never again, if he could avoid it, to be associated with the head of the family in a public spot. Look, he argued, what happened that day at the dog races, and Lord Ickenham agreed that the episode to which he alluded had been in some respects an unfortunate one, though he had always maintained, he said, that a wiser magistrate would have been content with a mere reprimand.
A good deal of walking about and hulloing is traditionally done at the Eton and Harrow match, and for some little while after parting from his nephew Lord Ickenham proceeded to saunter hither and thither, meeting old acquaintances and exchanging amiable civilities. Many of these old acquaintances had been contemporaries of his at school, and the fact that most of them looked as if they would never see a hundred and four again was a reminder of the passage of time that depressed him, as far as he was capable of being depressed. It was a relief when he observed approaching him someone who, though stout and florid and wearing a top hat with a dent in it, was at least many years from being senile. He greeted him warmly.
'Beefy, my dear fellow!'
'Ah, Frederick.'
Sir Raymond Bastable spoke absently. His thoughts were elsewhere. He was sufficiently present in spirit to be able to say Ah, Frederick,' but his mind was not on his half-brother-in-law. He was thinking of the modern young man. At the moment when Lord Ickenham accosted him, there had just risen before his mental eye a picture of the interior of the Old Bailey, with himself in a wig and silk gown cross-examining with pitiless severity the representative of that sub-species who had knocked his hat off.
When the hat he loved had suddenly parted from its moorings and gone gambolling over the pavement like a lamb in springtime, Sir Raymond Bastable's initial impression that it had been struck by a flying saucer had not lasted long. A clapping of hands and the sound of cheering from across the street drew his attention to the smoking-room window of the Drones Club and he perceived that it framed a sea of happy faces, each split by a six-inch grin. A moment later he had seen lying at his feet a handsome Brazil nut, and all things were made clear to him. What had occurred, it was evident, had been one more exhibition of the brainless hooliganism of the modern young man which all decent people so deplored.
Sir Raymond had never been fond of the modern young man, considering him idiotic, sloppy, disrespectful, inefficient and, generally speaking, a blot on the London scene, and this Brazil-nut sequence put, if one may so express it, the lid on his distaste. It solidified the view he had always held that steps ought to be taken about the modern young man and taken promptly. What steps, he could not at the moment suggest, but if, say, something on the order of the Black Death were shortly to start setting about these young pests and giving them what was coming to them, it would have his full approval. He would hold its coat and cheer it on.
With a powerful effort he removed himself from the Old Bailey.
'So you're here, are you, Frederick?' he said.
'In person,' Lord Ickenham assured him. 'Wonderful, running into you like this. Tell me all your news, my bright and bounding barrister.'
'News?'
'How's everything at home? Phoebe all right?'
'She is quite well.'
And you?'
'I also am quite well.'
'Splendid. You'll be even better when you're settled in down at Dovetail Hammer. Jane tells me you've taken Johnny Pearce's Hammer Lodge place there.'
'Yes. I shall be moving in shortly. Your godson, isn't he?'
'That's right.'
'I suppose that is why Jane was so insistent on my taking the house.'
'Her motives, I imagine, were mixed. She would, of course, for my sake be anxious to do Johnny a bit of good, but she also had your best interests at heart. She knew Dovetail Hammer was just the place for you. Good fishing, golf within easy reach and excellent fly-swatting to be had in the summer months. You'll be as snug as a bug in a rug there, and you'll find Johnny a pleasant neighbour. He's a capital young fellow.'
'Young?'
'Quite young.'
'Then tell him to keep away from me,' said Sir Raymond tensely. 'If any young man attempts to come near me, I'll set the dog on him.'
Lord Ickenham regarded him with surprise.
'You perplex me, Beefy. Why this bilious attitude toward the younger generation? Doesn't Youth with all its glorious traditions appeal to you?'
'It does not.'
'Why not?'
'Because, if you must know, some young thug knocked off my hat this afternoon.'
'You shock and astound me. With his umbrella?'
'With a Brazil nut.'
'Who was this fiend in human shape?'
'All I know is that he belongs to the Drones Club, which to my lasting regret is situated immediately opposite the Demosthenes. I was standing outside the Demosthenes, waiting for a cab, when something suddenly struck my hat a violent blow, lifting it from my head. I looked down, and saw a Brazil nut. It had obviously been thrown from the room on the ground floor of the Drones Club, for when I looked up the window was full of grinning faces.'
Sir Raymond started. A thought had occurred to him. 'Frederick!'
'Hullo?'
'Frederick!'
'Still here, old man.'
'Frederick, I invited you to lunch with me at the Demosthenes today.'
And very kind of you it was.'
'You declined because you had a previous engagement to lunch at the Drones Club.'
'Yes. Agony, of course, but I had no option.'
'You did lunch at the Drones Club?'
'Heartily.'
'Did you take your after-luncheon coffee in the smoking-room?'
'I did.'
'Then I put it to you,' said Sir Raymond, pouncing, 'that you must have seen everything that occurred and can identify the individual responsible for the outrage.'
It was plain that Lord Ickenham was impressed by this remorseless reasoning. He stood musing for a space in silence, a frown of concentration on his brow.
'Difficul
t always to reconstruct a scene,' he said at length, 'but as I close my eyes and think back, I do dimly recall a sort of stir and movement at the window end of the room and a group of young fellows clustered about someone who had... yes, by Jove, he had a catapult in his hand.'
'A catapult! Yes, yes, go on.'
'He appeared to be aiming with it at some object across the street, and do you know, Beefy, I am strongly inclined to think that this object may quite possibly have been your hat. To my mind, suspicion seems to point that way.'
'Who was he?'
'He didn't give me his card.'
'But you can describe his appearance.'
'Let me try. I remember a singularly handsome, clean-cut face and on the face a look of ecstasy and exaltation such as Jael, the wife of Heber, must have worn when about to hammer the Brazil nut into the head of Sisera, but... no, the mists rise and the vision fades. Too bad.'
'I'd give a hundred pounds to identify the fellow.'
'With a view to instituting reprisals?'
'Exactly.'
'You wouldn't consider just saying "Young blood, young blood" and letting it go at that?'
'I would not.'
'Well, it's for you to decide, of course, but it's rather difficult to see what you can do. You can't write a strong letter to The Times.'
'Why not?'
'My dear fellow! It would be fatal. Jane was telling me the other day that you were going to stand for Parliament at... where was it? Whitechapel?'
'Bottleton East. Frampton is thinking of retiring, and there will be a by-election there next summer probably. I am expecting the nomination.'
'Well, then, think of the effect of a letter to The Times on the electorate. You know what the British voter is like. Let him learn that you have won the Derby or saved a golden-haired child from a burning building, and yours is the name he puts a cross against on his ballot paper, but tell him that somebody has knocked your topper off with a Brazil nut and his confidence in you is shaken. He purses his lips and asks himself if you are the right man to represent him in the mother of Parliaments. I don't defend this attitude, I merely say it exists.'