‘I cannot quite understand what he says,’ announced Lord Ickenham at length, ‘because he sprained a finger this morning and that makes him stammer. But I gather that he wishes to have a word with me in private. Possibly my parrot has got something the matter with it which he is reluctant to mention even in sign language in front of a young unmarried girl. You know what parrots are. We will step outside.’
‘We will step outside,’ said Wilberforce.
‘Yes,’ said the girl Julia. ‘I feel like a walk.’
‘And you,’ said Lord Ickenham to the woman Connie, who was looking like a female Napoleon at Moscow. ‘Do you join the hikers?’
‘I shall remain and make myself a cup of tea. You will not grudge us a cup of tea, I hope?’
‘Far from it,’ said Lord Ickenham cordially. ‘This is Liberty Hall. Stick around and mop it up till your eyes bubble.’
Outside, the girl, looking more like a dewy rosebud than ever, fawned on the old buster pretty considerably.
‘I don’t know how to thank you!’ she said. And the pink chap said he didn’t, either.
‘Not at all, my dear, not at all,’ said Lord Ickenham.
‘I think you’re simply wonderful.’
‘No, no.’
‘You are. Perfectly marvellous.’
‘Tut, tut,’ said Lord Ickenham. ‘Don’t give the matter another thought.’
He kissed her on both cheeks, the chin, the forehead, the right eyebrow, and the tip of the nose, Pongo looking on the while in a baffled and discontented manner. Everybody seemed to be kissing this girl except him.
Eventually the degrading spectacle ceased and the girl and the pink chap shoved off, and Pongo was enabled to take up the matter of that hundred quid.
‘Where,’ he asked, ‘did you get all that money?’
‘Now, where did I?’ mused Lord Ickenham. ‘I know your aunt gave it to me for some purpose. But what? To pay some bill or other, I rather fancy.’
This cheered Pongo up slightly.
‘She’ll give you the devil when you get back,’ he said, with not a little relish. ‘I wouldn’t be in your shoes for something. When you tell Aunt Jane,’ he said, with confidence, for he knew his Aunt Jane’s emotional nature, ‘that you slipped her entire roll to a girl, and explain, as you will have to explain, that she was an extraordinarily pretty girl – a girl, in fine, who looked like something out of a beauty chorus of the better sort, I should think she would pluck down one of the ancestral battle-axes from the wall and jolly well strike you on the mazzard.’
‘Have no anxiety, my dear boy,’ said Lord Ickenham. ‘It is like your kind heart to be so concerned, but have no anxiety. I shall tell her that I was compelled to give the money to you to enable you to buy back some compromising letters from a Spanish demi-mondaine. She will scarcely be able to blame me for rescuing a fondly-loved nephew from the clutches of an adventuress. It may be that she will feel a little vexed with you for a while, and that you may have to allow a certain time to elapse before you visit Ickenham again, but then I shan’t be wanting you at Ickenham till the ratting season starts, so all is well.’
At this moment, there came toddling up to the gate of The Cedars a large red-faced man. He was just going in when Lord Ickenham hailed him.
‘Mr Roddis?’
‘Hey?’
‘Am I addressing Mr Roddis?’
‘That’s me.’
‘I am Mr J. G. Bulstrode from down the road,’ said Lord Ickenham. ‘This is my sister’s husband’s brother, Percy Frensham, in the lard and imported-butter business.’
The red-faced bird said he was pleased to meet them. He asked Pongo if things were brisk in the lard and imported-butter business, and Pongo said they were all right, and the red-faced bird said he was glad to hear it.
‘We have never met, Mr Roddis,’ said Lord Ickenham, ‘but I think it would be only neighbourly to inform you that a short while ago I observed two suspicious-looking persons in your house.’
‘In my house? How on earth did they get there?’
‘No doubt through a window at the back. They looked to me like cat burglars. If you creep up, you may be able to see them.’
The red-faced bird crept, and came back not exactly foaming at the mouth but with the air of a man who for two pins would so foam.
‘You’re perfectly right. They’re sitting in my parlour as cool as dammit, swigging my tea and buttered toast.’
‘I thought as much.’
‘And they’ve opened a pot of my raspberry jam.’
‘Ah, then you will be able to catch them red-handed. I should fetch a policeman.’
‘I will. Thank you, Mr Bulstrode.’
‘Only too glad to have been able to render you this little service, Mr Roddis,’ said Lord Ickenham. ‘Well, I must be moving. I have an appointment. Pleasant after the rain, is it not? Come, Percy.’
He lugged Pongo off.
‘So that,’ he said, with satisfaction, ‘is that. On these visits of mine to the metropolis, my boy, I always make it my aim, if possible, to spread sweetness and light. I look about me, even in a foul hole like Mitching Hill, and I ask myself – How can I leave this foul hole a better and happier foul hole than I found it? And if I see a chance, I grab it. Here is our omnibus. Spring aboard, my boy, and on our way home we will be sketching out rough plans for the evening. If the old Leicester Grill is still in existence, we might look in there. It must be fully thirty-five years since I was last thrown out of the Leicester Grill. I wonder who is the bouncer there now.’
Such (concluded the Crumpet) is Pongo Twistleton’s Uncle Fred from the country, and you will have gathered by now a rough notion of why it is that when a telegram comes announcing his impending arrival in the great city Pongo blenches to the core and calls for a couple of quick ones.
The whole situation, Pongo says, is very complex. Looking at it from one angle, it is fine that the man lives in the country most of the year. If he didn’t, he would have him in his midst all the time. On the other hand, by living in the country he generates, as it were, a store of loopiness which expends itself with frightful violence on his rare visits to the centre of things.
What it boils down to is this – Is it better to have a loopy uncle whose loopiness is perpetually on tap but spread out thin, so to speak, or one who lies low in distant Hants for three hundred and sixty days in the year and does himself proud in London for the other five? Dashed moot, of course, and Pongo has never been able to make up his mind on the point.
Naturally, the ideal thing would be if someone would chain the old hound up permanently and keep him from Jan. One to Dec. Thirty-one where he wouldn’t do any harm – viz. among the spuds and tenantry. But this, Pongo admits, is a Utopian dream. Nobody could work harder to that end than his Aunt Jane, and she has never been able to manage it.
9 ARCHIBALD AND THE MASSES
‘THIS HERE SOCIALISM,’ said a Pint of Bitter thoughtfully. ‘You see a lot of that about nowadays. Seems to be all the go.’ Nothing in the previous conversation – we had been speaking of mangel-wurzels – had led up to the remark, but in the matter of debate we of the bar-parlour of the Angler’s Rest are quick movers. We range. We flit. We leap from point to point. As an erudite Gin and Angostura once put it, we are like Caesar’s wife, ready for anything. Rapidly adjusting our minds, we prepared to deal with this new topic.
Ah,’ agreed a Small Bass, ‘you may well say that.’
‘You well may,’ said a Light Lager. ‘Spreading all the time, Socialism is. May be something in it, too. What I mean is, it doesn’t seem hardly right somehow that you and I should be living off the fat of the land, as the saying is, while there’s others, in humbler circumstances, who don’t know where to turn for their next half-pint.’
Mr Mulliner nodded.
‘That,’ he said, ‘was precisely how my nephew Archibald felt.’
‘He was a Socialist, was he?’
‘He became one temporarily.’
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The Small Bass wrinkled his forehead.
‘Seems to me you’ve told us about your nephew Archibald before. Was he the one who had the trouble with the explorer?’
‘That was Osbert.’
‘The one who stammered?’
‘No. That was George.’
‘You seem to have so many nephews.’
‘I have been singularly blessed in that respect,’ agreed Mr Mulliner. ‘But, as regards Archibald, it may serve to recall him to you if I mention that he was generally considered to be London’s leading exponent of the art of imitating a hen laying an egg.’
‘Of course, yes. He got engaged to a girl named Aurelia Cammarleigh.’
‘At the time when my story begins, he was still engaged to her and possibly the happiest young man in the whole W.1. postal district. But the storm-clouds, I regret to say, were only just over the horizon. The tempest which was so nearly to wreck the bark of Love had already begun to gather.’
Few fashionable engagements (said Mr Mulliner) have ever started with fairer prospects of success than that of my nephew Archibald and Aurelia Cammarleigh. Even cynical Mayfair had to admit that for once a really happy and enduring marriage appeared to be indicated. For such a union there is no surer basis than a community of taste, and this the young couple possessed in full measure. Archibald liked imitating hens, and Aurelia liked listening to him. She used to say she could listen to him all day, and she sometimes did.
It was after one of these sessions – when, hoarse but happy, he was walking back to his rooms to dress for dinner, that he found his progress impeded by a man of seedy aspect who, without any preamble but a short hiccough, said that he had not been able to taste bread for three days.
It puzzled Archibald a little that a complete stranger should be making him the recipient of confidences which might more reasonably have been bestowed upon his medical adviser: but it so happened that only recently he himself had not been able to taste even Stilton cheese. So he replied as one having knowledge.
‘Don’t you worry, old thing,’ he said. ‘That often happens when you get a cold in the head. It passes off.’
‘I have not got a cold in the head, sir,’ said the man. ‘I have got pains in the back, weak lungs, a sick wife, stiff joints, five children, internal swellings, and no pension after seven years in His Majesty’s army owing to jealousy in high quarters, but not a cold in the head. Why I can’t taste bread is because I have no money to buy it. I wish, sir, you could hear my children crying for bread.’
‘I’d love to,’ said Archibald civilly. ‘I must come up and see you some time. But tell me about bread. Does it cost much?’
‘Well, sir, it’s this way. If you buy it by the bottle, that’s expensive. What I always say is, best to get in a cask. But then, again, that needs capital.’
‘If I slipped you a fiver, could you manage?’
‘I’d try, sir.’
‘Right ho,’ said Archibald.
This episode had a singular effect on Archibald Mulliner. I will not say that it made him think deeply, for he was incapable of thinking deeply. But it engendered a curious gravity, an odd sense that life was stern and life was earnest, and he was still in the grip of this new mood when he reached his rooms and Meadowes, his man, brought him a tray with a decanter and syphon upon it.
‘Meadowes,’ said Archibald, ‘are you busy for the moment?’
‘No, sir.’
‘Then let us speak for a while on the subject of bread. Do you realize, Meadowes, that there are blokes who can’t get bread? They want it, their wives want it, their children are all for it, but in spite of this unanimity what is the upshot? No bread. I’ll bet you didn’t know that, Meadowes.’
‘Yes, sir. There is a great deal of poverty in London.’
‘Not really?’
‘Oh, yes, indeed, sir. You should go down to a place like Bottleton East. That is where you hear the Voice of the People.’
‘What people?’
‘The masses, sir. The martyred proletariat. If you are interested in the martyred proletariat, I could supply you with some well-written pamphlets. I have been a member of the League for the Dawn of Freedom for many years, sir. Our object, as the name implies, is to hasten the coming revolution.’
‘Like in Russia, do you mean?’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘Massacres and all that?’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘Now, listen, Meadowes,’ said Archibald firmly. ‘Fun’s fun, but no rot about stabbing me with a dripping knife. I won’t have it, do you understand?’
‘Very good, sir.’
‘That being clear, you may bring me those pamphlets. I’d like to have a look at them.’
Knowing Archibald as I do (said Mr Mulliner), I find it difficult to believe that the remarkable change which at this point took place in what for want of a better term one may call his mental outlook could have come entirely from reading pamphlets. Indeed, I cannot bring myself to think that he ever read one of those compositions in its entirety. You know what pamphlets are. They ramble. They go into sections and subsections. If they can think of a phrase like ‘the basic fundamentals of the principles governing distribution,’ they shove it in. It seems far more likely that he was influenced by hearing Meadowes speak in the Park. Meadowes, on his days off, had the third rostrum from the left as you enter by the Marble Arch gate, and in addition to an impressive delivery enjoyed a considerable gift of invective.
However, of one thing there is no doubt. Before the end of the second week Archibald had become completely converted to the gospel of the Brotherhood of Man: and, as this made him a graver, deeper Archibald, it was not long, of course, before Aurelia noticed the change. And one night, when they were dancing at the Mottled Earwig, she took him to task in her forthright way, accusing him in set terms of going about the place looking like an uncooked haddock.
‘I’m sorry, old girl,’ replied Archibald apologetically. ‘The fact is, I’m brooding a bit at the moment on the situation in Bottleton East.’
Aurelia stared at him.
‘Archibald,’ she said, for she was a girl of swift intuitions, ‘you’ve had one over the eight.’
‘No, I haven’t, honestly. It’s simply that I’m brooding. And I was wondering if you would mind if I toddled home fairly shortly. All this sort of thing jars on me a goodish bit. All this dancing and so forth, I mean. I mean to say, so different from the home-life of Bottleton East. I don’t think a chap ought to be dancing at a time when the fundamental distribution of whatever-it-is is so dashed what-d’you-call-it. You don’t find Stalin dancing. Nor Maxton. Nor, for the matter of that, Sidney, Lord Passfield.’
Aurelia refused to be mollified.
‘I don’t know what’s come over you,’ she said petulantly. ‘You seem absolutely to have changed this last couple of weeks. You used to be one of the cheeriest old bounders that ever donned a spat, and now you’re a sort of emperor of the Glooms. You don’t even do your hen-imitation any more.’
‘Well, the thing is, you can’t imitate a hen laying an egg properly if your heart’s bleeding for the martyred proletariat.’
‘The what?’
‘The martyred proletariat.’
‘What’s that?’
‘Well . . . er . . . it’s – how shall I put it? . . . it’s the martyred proletariat.’
‘You wouldn’t know a martyred proletariat if they brought it to you on a skewer with Béarnaise sauce.’
‘Oh, yes, I should. Meadowes has been giving me all the inside stuff. What it all boils down to, if you follow me, is that certain blokes – me, for example – have got much too much of the ready, while certain other blokes – the martyred proletariat, for instance – haven’t got enough. This makes it fairly foul for the m.p., if you see what I mean.’
‘I don’t see what you mean at all. Oh, well, let’s hope you’ll have slept all this off by tomorrow. By the way, where are you taking me to dine tomorrow?’ r />
Archibald looked embarrassed.
‘I’m awfully sorry, old prune, but I had rather planned to buzz down to Bottleton East tomorrow, to take a dekko at the martyred p.’
‘Listen,’ said Aurelia tensely, ‘do you know what you’re really doing to do tomorrow? You’re coming round to my house and you’re going to render that hen-imitation of yours . . .’
‘But it seems so shallow. Sir Stafford Cripps doesn’t imitate hens.’
‘. . . and render it,’ continued Aurelia, ‘with even more than ordinary brio, gusto and zip. Otherwise, everything is over.’
‘But don’t you realize that one four four oh point oh oh six families in Bottleton East . . .’
‘That will be all about Bottleton East,’ said Aurelia coldly. ’I’ve said all I am going to say. You understand the position. If, by closing-time tomorrow, you are not round at Number 36A, Park Street, imitating hens till your eyes bubble, you may seek elsewhere for a mate. Because, as far as I am concerned, my nomination will be cancelled. I don’t think anybody could call me an unreasonable girl. I am not capricious, not exacting. But I’m positively dashed if I’m going to marry a man who is beginning to be hailed on all sides as London’s leading living corpse.’
It was a thoughtful Archibald Mulliner who rose towards evening of the following day and rang the bell for Meadowes, his man. This expedition to Bottleton East was very near his heart. What he felt, he meant to say, was that it’s not much good a chap loving the Masses if he never goes near them. He wanted to dash about and fraternize, and show the Masses that in Archibald Mulliner they had a bird whose heart bled for them. And unless he went and looked them up every now and then, they couldn’t know that there was an Archibald Mulliner in existence.