And now, after seven years, the blow was about to fall. Or so I felt justified in supposing. And I could see that Anastatia thought the same. There was a drawn look on her face, and she was watching her husband closely. Once when I was dining at her house and a tactless guest spoke of the June moon, she changed the subject hurriedly, but not before I had seen Rodney Spelvin start and throw his head up like a war horse at the sound of the bugle. He recovered himself quickly, but for an instant he had looked like a man who has suddenly awakened to the fact that “June” rhymes with “moon” and feels that steps of some sort ought to be taken.
A week later suspicion became certainty. I had strolled over to William’s cottage after dinner, as I often did, and I found him and Anastatia in the morning-room. At a glance I could see that something was wrong. William was practising distrait swings with a number three iron, a moody frown on his face, while Anastatia in what seemed to me a feverish way sat knitting a sweater for her little nephew, Braid Bates, the son of William and Jane, at the moment away from home undergoing intensive instruction from a leading professional in preparation for the forthcoming contest for the Children’s Cup. Both William and Jane rightly felt that the child could not start getting the competition spirit too soon.
Anastatia was looking pale, and William would have been, too, no doubt, if it had been possible for him to look pale. Years of incessant golf in all weathers had converted his cheeks into a substance resembling red leather.
“Lovely evening,” I said.
“Beautiful,” replied Anastatia wildly.
“Good weather for the crops.”
“Splendid,” gasped Anastatia.
“And where is Rodney?”
Anastatia quivered all over and dropped a stitch.
“He’s out, I think,” she said in a strange, strangled voice.
William’s frown deepened. A plain, blunt man, he dislikes evasions.
“He is not out,” he said curtly. “He is at his home, writing poetry. Much better to tell him,” he added to Anastatia, who had uttered a wordless sound of protest. “You can’t keep the thing dark, and he will be able to handle it. He has white whiskers. A fellow with white whiskers is bound to be able to handle things better than a couple of birds like us who haven’t white whiskers. Stands to reason.”
I assured them that they could rely on my secrecy and discretion and that I would do anything that lay in the power of myself and my whiskers to assist them in their distress.
“So Rodney is writing poetry?” I said. “I feared that this might happen. Yes, I think I may say I saw it coming. About pixies, I suppose?”
Anastatia gave a quick sob and William a quick snort.
“About pixies, you suppose, do you?” he cried. “Well, you’re wrong. If pixies were all the trouble, I wouldn’t have a word to say. Let Rodney Spelvin come in at the door and tell me he has written a poem about pixies, and I will clasp him in my arms. Yes,” said William, “to my bosom. The thing has gone far, far beyond the pixie stage. Do you know where Rodney is at this moment? Up in the nursery, bending over his son Timothy’s cot, gathering material for a poem about the unfortunate little rat when asleep. Some bolony, no doubt, about how he hugs his teddy bear and dreams of angels. Yes, that is what he is doing, writing poetry about Timothy. Horrible whimsical stuff that… Well, when I tell you that he refers to him throughout as ‘Timothy Bobbin’, you will appreciate what we are up against.”
I am not a weak man, but I confess that I shuddered.
“Timothy Bobbin?”
“Timothy by golly Bobbin. No less.”
I shuddered again. This was worse than I had feared. And yet, when you examined it, how inevitable it was. The poetry virus always seeks out the weak spot. Rodney Spelvin was a devoted father. It had long been his practice to converse with his offspring in baby talk, though hitherto always in prose. It was only to be expected that when he found verse welling up in him, the object on which he would decant it would be his unfortunate son.
“What it comes to,” said William, “is that he is wantonly laying up a lifetime of shame and misery for the wretched little moppet. In the years to come, when he is playing in the National Amateur, the papers will print photographs of him with captions underneath explaining that he is the Timothy Bobbin of the well-known poems—”
“Rodney says he expects soon to have sufficient material for a slim volume,” put in Anastatia in a low voice.
“—and he will be put clean off his stroke. Misery, desolation and despair,” said William. “That is the programme, as I see it.”
“Are these poems so very raw?”
“Read these and judge for yourself. I swiped them off his desk.”
The documents which he thrust upon me appeared to be in the nature of experimental drafts, intended at a later stage to be developed more fully; what one might perhaps describe as practice swings.
The first ran:
Timothy Bobbin has a puppy,
A dear little puppy that goes Bow-wow….
Beneath this were the words:
Woa! Wait a minute!
followed, as though the writer had realized in time that this “uppy” rhyming scheme was going to present difficulties, by some scattered notes:—
Safer to change to rabbit?
(Habit… Grab it… Stab it… Babbitt)
Rabbit looks tough, too. How about canary?
(Airy, dairy, fairy, hairy Mary, contrary, vary)
Note: Canaries go tweet-tweet.
(Beat, seat, feet, heat, meet, neat, repeat, sheet, complete, discreet).
Yes, canary looks like goods.
Timothy Bobbin has a canary.
Gosh, this is pie.
Timothy Bobbin has a canary.
As regards its sex opinions vary.
If it just goes tweet-tweet,
We shall call it Pete,
But if it lays an egg, we shall switch to Mary.
(Query: Sex motif too strongly stressed)
That was all about canaries. The next was on a different theme:
Timothy Bobbin has ten little toes.
He takes them out walking wherever he goes.
And if Timothy gets a cold in the head,
His ten little toes stay with him in bed.
William saw me wince, and asked if that was the toes one. I said it was hurried on to the third and last.
It ran:
Timothy
Bobbin
Goes
Hoppity
Hoppity
Hoppity
Hop.
With this Rodney appeared to have been dissatisfied, for beneath it he had written the word
Reminiscent?
as though he feared that he might have been forestalled by some other poet, and there was a suggestion in the margin that instead of going Hoppity-hoppity-hop his hero might go Boppity-Boppity-bop. The alternative seemed to me equally melancholy, and it was with a grave face that I handed the papers back to William.
“Bad,” I said gravely. “Bad is right.”
“Has this been going on long?”
“For days the fountain pen has hardly been out of his hand.” I put the question which had been uppermost in my mind from the first.
“Has it affected his golf?”
“He says he is going to give up golf.”
“What! But the Rabbits Umbrella?”
“He intends to scratch.”
There seemed to be nothing more to be said. I left them. I wanted to be alone, to give this sad affair my undivided attention. As I made for the door, I saw that Anastatia had buried her face in her hands, while William, with brotherly solicitude, stood scratching the top of her head with the number three iron, no doubt in a well-meant effort to comfort and console.
For several days I brooded tensely on the problem, but it was all too soon borne in upon me that William had over-estimated the results-producing qualities of white whiskers. I think I may say with all modesty that mine are
as white as the next man’s, but they got me nowhere. If I had been a clean-shaven juvenile in the early twenties, I could not have made less progress towards a satisfactory settlement.
It was all very well, I felt rather bitterly at times, for William to tell me to “handle it”, but what could I do? What can any man do when he is confronted by these great natural forces? For years, it was evident, poetry had been banking up inside Rodney Spelvin, accumulating like steam in a boiler on the safety valve of which someone is sitting. And now that the explosion had come, its violence was such as to defy all ordinary methods of treatment. Does one argue with an erupting crater? Does one reason with a waterspout? When William in his airy way told me to “handle it”, it was as if someone had said to the young man who bore ‘mid snow and ice the banner with the strange device Excelsior— “Block that avalanche.”
I could see only one gleam of light in the whole murky affair. Rodney Spelvin had not given up golf. Yielding to his wife’s prayers, he had entered for the competition for the Rabbits Umbrella, and had shown good form in the early rounds. Three of the local cripples had fallen victims to his prowess, leaving him a popular semi-finalist. It might be, then, that golf would work a cure.
It was as I was taking an afternoon nap a few days later that I was aroused by a sharp prod in the ribs and saw William’s wife Jane standing beside me.
“Well?” she was saying.
I blinked, and sat up.
“Ah, Jane,” I said.
“Sleeping at a time like this,” she exclaimed, and I saw that she was regarding me censoriously. If Jane Bates has a fault, it is that she does not readily make allowances. “But perhaps you are just taking a well-earned rest after doping out the scheme of a lifetime?”
I could not deceive her.
“I am sorry. No.”
“No scheme?”
“None.”
Jane Bates’s face, like that of her husband, had been much worked upon by an open-air life, so she did not pale. But her nose twitched with sudden emotion, and she looked as if she had foozled a short putt for hole and match in an important contest. I saw her glance questioningly at my whiskers.
“Yes,” I said, interpreting her look, “I know they are white, but I repeat: No scheme. I have no more ideas than a rabbit; indeed not so many.”
“But William said you would handle the thing.”
“It can’t be handled.”
“It must be. Anastatia is going into a decline. Have you seen Timothy lately?”
“I saw him yesterday in the woods with his father. He was plucking a bluebell.”
“No, he wasn’t.”
“He certainly had the air of one who is plucking a bluebell.”
“Well, he wasn’t. He was talking into it. He said it was a fairy telephone and he was calling up the Fairy Queen to invite her to a party on his teddy bear’s birthday. Rodney stood by, taking notes, and that evening wrote a poem about it.”
“Does Timothy often do that sort of thing?”
“All the time. The child has become a ham. He never ceases putting on an act. He can’t eat his breakfast cereal without looking out of the corner of his eye to see how it’s going with the audience. And when he says his prayers at night his eyes are ostensibly closed, but all the while he is peering through his fingers and counting the house. And that’s not the worst of it. A wife and mother can put up with having an infant ham in the home, constantly popping out at her and being cute, provided that she is able to pay the household bills, but now Rodney says he is going to give up writing thrillers and devote himself entirely to poetry.”
“But his contracts?”
“He says he doesn’t give a darn for any contracts. He says he wants to get away from it all and give his soul a chance. The way he talks about his soul and the raw deal it has had all these years, you would think it had been doing a stretch in Wormwood Scrubs. He says he is fed up with bloodstains and that the mere thought of bodies in the library with daggers of Oriental design in their backs make him sick. He broke the news to his agent on the telephone last night, and I could hear the man’s screams as plainly as if he had been in the next room.”
“But is he going to stop eating?”
“Practically. So is Anastatia. He says they can get along quite nicely on wholesome and inexpensive vegetables. He thinks it will help his poetry. He says look at Rabinadrath Tagore. Never wrapped himself around a T-bone steak in his life, and look where he fetched up. All done on rice, he said, with an occasional draft of cold water from the spring. I tell you my heart bleeds for Anastatia. A lunatic husband and a son who talks into bluebells, and she’ll have to cope with them on Brussels sprouts. She certainly drew the short straw when she married that bard.”
She paused in order to snort, and suddenly, without warning, as so often happens, the solution came to me.
“Jane!” I said, “I believe I see the way out.”
“You do?”
There flashed into her face a look which I had only once seen there before, on the occasion when the opponent who had fought her all the way to the twentieth hole in the final of the Ladies’ Championship of the club was stung by a wasp while making the crucial putt. She kissed me between the whiskers and was good enough to say that she had known all along that I had it in me.
“When do you expect your son Braid back?”
“Some time to-morrow afternoon.”
“When he arrives, send him to me. I will outline the position of affairs to him, and I think we can be safe in assuming that he will immediately take over.”
“I don’t understand.”
“You know what Braid is like. He has no reticences”
I spoke feelingly. Braid Bates was one of those frank, uninhibited children who are not afraid to speak their minds, and there had been certain passages between us in the not distant past in the course of which I had learned more about my personal appearance from two minutes of his conversation than I could have done from years of introspective study. At the time, I confess, I had been chagrined and had tried fruitlessly to get at him with a niblick, but now I found myself approving wholeheartedly of this trait in his character.
“Reflect. What will Braid’s reaction be to the news that these poems are being written about Timothy? He will be revolted, and will say so, not mincing his words. Briefly, he will kid the pants off the young Spelvin, and it should not be long before the latter, instead of gloating obscenely, will be writhing in an agony of shame at the mention of Timothy Bobbin and begging Rodney to lay off. And surely even a poet cannot be deaf to the pleadings of the child he loves. Leave it to Braid. He will put everything right.”
Jane had grasped it now, and her face was aglow with the light of mother love.”
“Why, of course!” she cried, clasping her hands in a sort of ecstasy. “I ought to have thought of it myself. People may say what they like about my sweet Braid, but they can’t deny that he is the rudest child this side of the Atlantic Ocean. I’ll send him to you the moment he clocks in.”
Braid Bates at that time was a young plug-ugly of some nine summers, in appearance a miniature edition of William and in soul and temperament a combination of Dead End Kid and army mule; a freckled hard-boiled character with a sardonic eye and a mouth which, when not occupied in eating, had a cynical twist to it. He spoke little as a general thing, but when he did speak seldom failed to find a chink in the armour. The impact of such a personality on little Timothy must, I felt, be tremendous, and I was confident that we could not have placed the child in better hands.
I lost no time in showing him the poem about the Fairy Queen and the bluebell. He read it in silence, and when he had finished drew a deep breath.
“Is Timothy Bobbin Timothy?”
“He is.”
“This poem’s all about Timothy?”
“Precisely.”
“Will it be printed in a book?”
“In a slim volume, yes. Together with others of the same type.”
r /> I could see that he was deeply stirred, and felt that I had sown the good seed.
“You will probably have quite a good deal to say about this to Timothy at one time and another,” I said. “Don’t be afraid to speak out for fear of wounding his feelings. Remind yourself that it is all for his good. The expression ‘cruel to be kind’ occurs to one.”
His manner, as I spoke, seemed absent, as if he were turning over in his mind a selection of good things to be said to his little cousin when they met, and shortly afterwards he left me, so moved that on my offering him a ginger ale and a slice of cake he appeared not to have heard me. I retired to rest that night with the gratifying feeling that I had done my day’s good deed, and was on the verge of falling asleep when the telephone bell rang.
It was Jane Bates. Her voice was agitated.
“You and your schemes!” she said. “I beg your pardon?”
“Do you know what has happened?”
“What?”
“William is writing poetry.”
It seemed to me that I could not have heard her correctly.
“William?”
“William.”
“You mean Rodney—”
“I don’t mean Rodney. Let me tell you in a few simple words what has happened. Braid returned from your house like one in a dream.”
“Yes, I thought he seemed impressed.”
“Please do not interrupt. It makes it difficult for me to control myself, and I have already bitten a semi-circle out of the mouthpiece. Like one in a dream, I was saying. For the rest of the evening he sat apart, brooding and not answering when spoken to. At bedtime he came out of the silence. And how!”
“And what?”
“I said ‘And how!’ He announced that that poem of Rodney’s about the Fairy Queen was the snappiest thing he had ever read and he didn’t see why, if Rodney could write poems about Timothy, William couldn’t write poems about him. And when we told him not to talk nonsense, he delivered his ultimatum. He said that if William did not immediately come through, he would remove his name from the list of entrants for the Children’s Cup. What did you say?”