'Eh?'
'I thought you spoke.'
'I said "Ha!" if you call that speaking.'
'Why did you say "Ha!"?'
'Because I felt like saying "Ha!" No objection to me saying "Ha," is there?'
'None whatever. This is Liberty Hall.'
'Thanks. Well, I can't see it.'
'See what?'
'All this about old Bastable becoming a different man. According to you, he still bites pieces out of his sister.'
'Merely because he is always coming up to London and bullying witnesses in court. This makes his progress slower than one could wish. But I am confident that the magic of Dovetail Hammer will eventually work. Give him time. It isn't easy for leopards to change their spots.'
'Do they want to?'
'I couldn't say. I know so few leopards. But I think Beefy will improve. If Barbara Crowe hadn't returned him to store, he would already have become a reformed character. I am convinced that, married to her, he would today be the lovable Beefy of thirty years ago, for she wouldn't have stood that Captain Bligh stuff for a minute. Too bad the union blew a fuse, but how sadly often that happens. When you get to my age, my dear Pongo, you will realize that what's wrong with the world is that there are far too many sundered hearts in it. I've noticed it again and again. It takes so little to set a couple of hearts asunder. That's why I'm worried about Johnny'
'Isn't he all right?'
'Far from it.'
'Doesn't he like being married?'
'He isn't married. That's the whole trouble. He's been engaged to Bunny Farringdon for more than a year, but not a move on his part to set those wedding bells ringing out in the little village church. She speaks to him of buying two of everything for her trousseau and begs him to let her have the green light, but all she gets is a "Some other time". It gives me a pang.'
'Pang C?'
'Pang, as you say, C. Good heavens,' said Lord Ickenham, looking at his watch. 'Is it as late as that? I must rush. I'm catching the 3.26.'
'But half a second. Tell me more about this. Isn't she getting fed up?'
'Distinctly so. I was having lunch with her yesterday, and the impression I received was that she was becoming as mad as a wet hen. Any day now I expect to see in The Times an announcement that the wedding arranged between Jonathan Twistleton Pearce of Hammer Hall, Dovetail Hammer, Berks, and Belinda Farringdon of Plunkett Mews, Onslow Square, South Kensington, will not take place.'
'What do you think's at the bottom of it? Money? Johnny's pretty hard up, of course.'
'Not too well fixed, I agree. The cross he has to bear is that Hammer Hall is one of those betwixt-and-between stately homes of England, so large that it costs the dickens of a lot to keep up but not large enough to lure the populace into packing sandwiches and hard-boiled eggs and coming in charabancs to inspect it at half-a-crown a head. Still, what with running it as a guest-house and selling an occasional piece of furniture and writing those suspense novels of his, he should be in a position to get married if he wants to. Especially now that he is getting quite a satisfactory rent from Beefy for the Lodge. I don't think money is the trouble.'
Pongo drew thoughtfully at his cigarette. A possible solution of the mystery had occurred to him. Devoted to his Sally, he personally would not have looked at another female – no, not even if she had come leaping at him in the nude out of a pie at a bachelor party, but he was aware that there were other, less admirable men who were inclined to flit like butterflies from flower to flower and to run their lives more on the lines of Don Juan and Casanova. Could it be that his old friend Jonathan Pearce was one of these?
'I don't often get together with Johnny these days,' he said. 'It must be well over a year since I saw him last. How is he as of even date?'
'Quite robust, I believe.'
'I mean in the way of staunchness and steadfastness. It just struck me that the reason he's jibbing at jumping off the dock might be that he's met someone else down at Dovetail Hammer.'
'Do you know Dovetail Hammer?'
'Never been there.'
'I thought you hadn't, or you would not have made a fatuous suggestion like that. It isn't a place where you meet someone else. There's the vicar's daughter, who is engaged to the curate, and the doctor's daughter, betrothed to a chap who's planting coffee in Kenya, and that, except for Phoebe and Johnny's old nurse, Nannie Bruce, exhausts the female population. It's not possible for his heart to have strayed.'
'Well, something must have happened.'
'Unquestionably.'
'You'd better talk to him.'
'I intend to, like a Dutch godfather. We can't have this playing fast and loose with a young girl's affections. Letting the side down, is the way I look at it. And now, young Pongo, stand out of my way, or I'll roll over you like a Juggernaut. If I miss that train, there isn't another till five-forty.'
CHAPTER 8
Unless your destination is within comfortable walking distance – the Blue Boar, let us say, or the Beetle and Wedge, both of which are just across the street from the station – the great thing to do on alighting from the train at Dovetail Hammer is to nip out quick and make sure of getting the station cab. (There is only one – Arthur Popworth, proprietor.)
Lord Ickenham, who had been there before and knew the ropes, did this. The afternoon was now warm, and he had no desire to trudge the mile to the Hall carrying a suitcase. He had just bespoken Mr Popworth's services and was about to enter the vehicle, when there emerged from the station a gentlemanly figure crying 'Hey, taxi!' and registering chagrin on perceiving that he had been forestalled. Oily Carlisle had lingered on the platform seeking from a porter with no roof to his mouth information as to where Sir Raymond Bastable was to be found.
Lord Ickenham, always the soul of consideration, turned back and beamed with his customary geniality. He did not particularly like Oily's looks, but he was humane.
'If you are going my way, sir,' he said, 'I shall be delighted to give you a lift.'
'Awfully kind of you, sir,' said Oily in the Oxford accent which he had been at some pains to cultivate for professional purposes. 'I want a place called Hammer Hall.'
'My own objective. Are you staying there?'
'No – I'm—'
'I thought you might be. It's a guest-house now.'
'Is that so? No, I'm returning to town. Just run down to see a man on business. Hammer Lodge the porter said the name of his house was, and it's somewhere near the Hall.'
'Just before you get there. I'll drop you.'
'Frightfully kind of you.'
'Not at all, not at all. It all comes under the head of spreading sweetness and light.'
The cab made a noise like an explosion in a boiler factory and began to move. There was a momentary silence in its interior, occupied by Lord Ickenham in wondering what business this dubious character, whose fishiness his practised eye had detected at a glance, could have to conduct with Beefy; by Oily in massaging the small of his back. For a long time now the heavy underclothing on which his loved one had insisted had been irking him.
'Warm day,' said Lord Ickenham at length.
'I'll say,' said Oily. And can you beat it?' he went on, having reached the stage of exasperation when a man has to have a confidant, no matter who he be. 'My wife made me wear my thick woollies.'
'You shock me profoundly. Why was that?'
'Said there was a nasty east wind.'
'I hadn't noticed it.'
'Me, neither.'
'You have a sensitive skin?'
'Yes, I have. Very.'
'I suspected that that was the reason why you were behaving like a one-armed paperhanger with the hives. Watching you at work, I was reminded of the young lady of Natchez, whose clothes were all tatters and patches. In alluding to which, she would say, "Well, Ah itch, and wherever Ah itches, Ah scratches." If you wish to undress, pay no attention to me. And Mr Popworth, I know, is a married man and will take the broad view.'
A feelin
g of irritation, the spiritual equivalent of the one he was feeling in the small of the back, began to grip Oily. He found his companion's manner frivolous and unsympathetic and was conscious of an urge to retaliate in some way, to punish this scoffer for his untimely gaiety, to wipe, in a word, that silly smile off his face. And most fortunately he possessed the means to do so. In his vest pocket there nestled a ring made of what looked like gold, in which was set a large red stone that looked like a ruby. It seemed the moment to produce it.
Oily Carlisle had not always been a man at the top of his profession, selling stock in non-existent copper mines to the highest in the land and putting through deals that ran into five figures. He had started at the bottom of the ladder as the genial young fellow who had found a ruby ring in the street and was anxious to sell it, the darned thing being of no use to him, and a touch of sentiment led him to carry on his person always this symbol of his beginnings. He regarded it as a sort of charm or luck piece.
Fingering it now, he said:
'Take a look at this.'
Lord Ickenham did so, and felt a pleasurable glow stealing over him. His, in the years before he had succeeded to the title and was an impecunious younger son scratching for a living in New York, Arizona and elsewhere, had been a varied and interesting career, in the course of which he had encountered a considerable number of what are technically known as lumberers, and he had always obtained a great deal of spiritual uplift from their society To meet once again an optimist who – unless he was sadly wronging this sleek and shiny fellow-traveller – hoped to sell him a ruby ring he had found in the street carried him back to those good old days and would have restored his youth, had his youth needed restoring.
'My word!' he said admiringly 'That looks valuable. How much did you give for that?'
'Well, I'll tell you,' said Oily. 'It's rather an odd story. You're not a lawyer, by any chance, are you, sir?'
Lord Ickenham said he was not.
'Why I asked was, I was walking along Piccadilly this morning, and saw this lying on the side-walk, and I thought you might be able to tell me if findings are keepings in a case like that.'
'Speaking as a layman, I should say most certainly.'
'You really think so?'
'I do indeed. The advice I always give to young men starting out in life and finding ruby rings in the street is "Grab the money and run for the train." You want to sell it, I suppose?'
'If it's not against the law. I wouldn't want to do anything that wasn't right.'
'Of course not. Naturally. About how much were you thinking of charging?'
Oily, too, had now begun to feel a pleasurable glow. This was pretty elementary stuff, of course, and he knew he ought to have been a little ashamed of himself for stooping to it, but it was giving him something of a nostalgic thrill to be back in the days when he had been a young fellow starting to break into the game.
'That's where I can't seem to make up my mind,' he said. 'If it's genuine, I suppose it's worth a hundred pounds or so, but how's one to tell?'
'Oh, I'm sure it's genuine. Look at that ruby. Very red.'
'That's true.'
'And the gold. Very yellow.'
'That's true, too.'
'I think you would be perfectly justified in asking a hundred pounds for this ring.'
'You do?'
'Fully that.'
'Would you buy it for a hundred pounds?'
'Like a shot.'
'Then—'
'But', proceeded Lord Ickenham, 'for the fact that as a purchaser of ruby rings from chance-met strangers I am unfortunately situated. Some time ago my wife, who is a woman who believes in a strong, centralized government, decided to take over the family finances and administer them herself, leaving me just that little bit of spending money which a man requires for tobacco, self-respect, golf balls and so on. So I have to watch the pennies. My limit is a shilling. If you would care to settle for that, you have found a customer. Or, as this warm friendship has sprung up between us, shall we say eighteen pence?'
Oily was too much the gentleman to use bad language, but the look he gave his companion was not at all the sort of look he ought to have directed at anyone with whom he had formed a warm friendship.
'You make me sick,' he said, speaking the words from between clenched teeth with no trace of an Oxford accent.
It was in jovial mood that some moments later, having dropped the stowaway outside Hammer Lodge, Lord Ickenham stepped from the station cab at the door of Hammer Hall. He was genuinely grateful to his recent buddy for having given him five minutes of clean, wholesome entertainment, free from all this modern suggestiveness, and he wished him luck if he was planning to sell that ring to Beefy.
The ordinary visitor to the ancestral home of the Pearces, arriving at the front door, stands on the top step and presses the bell, and when nothing happens presses it again, but these formalities are not for godfathers. Lord Ickenham walked right in, noting as he passed through the spacious entrance hall how clean, though shabby, everything was. Nannie Bruce's work, he presumed, with a little assistance, no doubt, from some strong-young-girl-from-the-village.
Externally unchanged in the four hundred years during which it had housed the family of Pearce, internally, like so many country mansions of the post-second-world-war period, Hammer Hall showed unmistakable signs of having seen better days. There were gaps on the walls where tapestries had hung, hiatuses along the floor where chests and tables were missing. A console table which was a particular favourite of his, Lord Ickenham observed, had folded its tents like the Arabs and silently stolen away since his last visit, and he was sorry to see that that hideous imitation walnut cabinet, a survival from Victorian days, had not gone the same way, for it had always offended his educated eye and he had often begged his godson to get rid of it.
He sighed a little, and with a fourth pang added to the three he had mentioned to Pongo made his way to the room down the passage where Johnny Pearce, when not interrupted by Nannie Bruce, wrote those suspense novels which helped, though not very much, to keep Hammer Hall's head above water.
It was apparent that she had interrupted him now, for the first thing Lord Ickenham heard as he opened the door was her voice, speaking coldly and sternly
'I've no patience, Master Jonathan. Oh, good evening, your lordship.'
Nannie Bruce, a tall, gangling light-heavyweight with a suggestion in her appearance of a private in the Grenadiers dressed up to play the title role in Charley's Aunt, was one of those doggedly faithful retainers who adhere to almost all old families like barnacles to the hulls of ships. As what she called a slip of a girl, though it was difficult, seeing her now, to believe that she had ever had a girlish sliphood, she had come to Hammer Hall to act as nurse to the infant Johnny. By the time he went off to his first school and the need for her services might have been supposed to have ceased, the idea of dispensing with them had become an idle dream. She was as much a fixture as the stone lions on the gates or the funny smell in the attic.
'You are in your old room, your lordship,' she said. 'I'll be going and seeing to it. So I'll be glad if you would kindly speak to her, Master Jonathan.'
'She does her best, Nannie.'
'And a poor best it is. She's a gaby, that one. Verily, as a jewel of gold in a swine's snout is a woman which is without discretion. That's what Ecclesiastes wrote in the good book, Master Jonathan,' said Miss Bruce, 'and he was right.'
The door closed behind her, and Johnny Pearce, a personable young man with a pleasant but worried face, sat jabbing moodily with his pen at the sheet of paper on which he had been writing of Inspector Jervis, a fictional character to whom he was greatly addicted. Lord Ickenham eyed him with concern. If vultures were not gnawing at his godson's bosom, he was feeling, he did not know a vulture-gnawed bosom when he saw one. Only the thought that Belinda Farringdon was having similar vulture-trouble and that he had come here to talk to Johnny about it like a Dutch godfather restrained him from
condoling and sympathizing.
'What was all that?' he asked.
'The same old thing. Another row with the cook.'
'She has them frequently?'
'All the time.'
'Has the cook given notice?'
'Not yet, but she will. Cooks never stay here more than about five minutes. They can't stand Nannie.'
'She is a bit testing, I suppose, though a useful person to have around if you want to brush up your Ecclesiastes. However, it is not of Nannie and cooks and Ecclesiastes that I wish to speak,' said Lord Ickenham, getting down to it. 'Far more urgent matters are toward. I saw Bunny yesterday.'
'Oh, did you?'
'Gave her lunch. Smoked salmon, poulet en casserole and a fruit salad. She toyed with them in the order named. In fact, the word "toyed" overstates it. She pushed her plate away untasted.'
'Good Lord! Isn't she well?'
'Physically, yes, but spiritually considerably below par. It's in the soul that it catches her. She is fretting and chafing because you keep postponing the happy day. Why the devil don't you marry the girl, Johnny?'
'I can't!'
'Of course you can. Better men than you have got married. Myself for one. Nor have I ever regretted it. I'm not saying I enjoyed the actual ceremony. I had the feeling, as I knelt at the altar, that the eyes of everybody in the ringside pews were riveted on the soles of my boots, and it bathed me in confusion. I have a foot as shapely as the next man and my boots were made to order by the best booterers in London, but the illusion that I was wearing a pair of those things people go hunting fish under water in was very strong. That, however, was but a passing malaise and the thought that in about another brace of shakes the dearest girl in the world would be mine bucked me up like a week at Bognor Regis. Honestly, Johnny, you ought to nerve yourself and go through it. It only needs will power. You're breaking that pen,' said Lord Ickenham, 'and what is far, far worse, you are breaking the heart of a sweet blue-eyed girl with hair the colour of ripe corn. You should have seen her yesterday. I am a strong man, not easily shaken, but as I watched her recoiling from that poulet en casserole, as if it had been something dished up by the Borgias, my eyes were wet with unshed tears. I blush for you, Johnny, and am surprised and hurt that you seem incapable of blushing for yourself. To think that any godson of mine can go about the place giving the woman who has placed her trust in him the sleeve across the windpipe like this makes me realize that godsons are not what they were.'