Summer Moonshine (19 page)

'You have ruined my whole life.'

'I don't see how.'

'Adrian has broken off the engagement.'

'He has?'

'Yes.'

'Well, that's fine.'

'Don't talk like that!'

'I will talk like that. You don't love him.'

'I do.'

'You don't.'

Jane's lip, already much bitten that afternoon, received another nip.

'Well, we will not discuss the point.'

'Pompous,' said Joe warningly.

'Will you stop calling me pompous!'

'I'm sorry.'

Once more, regardless of Mr Bulpitt's creature comforts, she trod on the accelerator, and Joe, about to speak further, saw that it would be useless now to continue to put forward reasoned arguments. He leaned back and gave himself up to thought.

He was a good deal affected by the irony of it all. Here was the girl he loved, tilting her chin at him and mutely allowing him to gather that his standing with her was approximately that of some slug or worm, and all because he had told Adrian Peake that her father was after him with a hunting crop. And
you couldn't get away from the fact that her father was. If ever since the world began a Baronet had been desirous of laying into a twerp with the blunt instrument in question, Sir Buckstone Abbott was that Baronet and Adrian Peake that twerp. The only possible criticism the sternest judge could make of his actions was that he had slightly antedated his information.

He awoke from his reverie to find that the car had stopped. Some moments back, scattered houses had come into view, to be succeeded by other houses, less scattered, and for the last few minutes they had been running through a grove of uninterrupted red brick. This in its turn had given way to shops, public houses and all the other familiar phenomena of the principal street of a flourishing country town. It was outside one of these public houses, not far from an empty green charabanc against whose bonnet a uniformed driver leaned smoking a cigarette, that Jane had brought the two-seater to a halt. Joe hopped down from the rumble seat and stood waiting for orders.

Jane's face, he was sorry to see, was still cold and set. She jerked her head imperiously at the driver of the charabanc.

'Ask him where the nearest doctor is.'

'He won't know. Something tells me he is a stranger in these parts himself.'

'Then go and ask in the public house.'

'Very well. Can I bring you a little something from the bar?'

'Would you mind hurrying, please?'

'Watch!' said Joe. 'Gone with the wind.'

And Jane, relieved of his noxious presence, was free to devote her mind to the mystery of this sudden reappearance of her Uncle Sam – a problem which, as Sherlock Holmes would have said, seemed to present several features of interest.

Of the peculiar circumstances which had rendered Mr Bulpitt so unpopular with her father, Jane was entirely ignorant. Sir Buckstone had shrunk from letting her know that her family tree was tainted by the presence among its branches of plasterers, and – a still more compelling reason for silence – he did not wish her to be in a position, on the Princess Dwornitzchek's arrival, to let fall some incautious remark, such as the best of girls are apt to do, which would put that lady in possession of the facts.

Secrecy had seemed to him best, and he had accordingly answered her inquiry as to what had become of her uncle since she had talked with him in the dining-room, with the statement that business had called him back to London. She had been left with the impression that as soon as his business was completed, Mr Bulpitt would be coming to live at the Hall.

And now it appeared that he had been in the neighbourhood all the time, his headquarters the houseboat
Mignonette.

There could be only one solution of this. Recalling her father's emotion at the prospect of having to place his relative by marriage on the free list, Jane saw what had happened. Torn between the sacred obligations of hospitality and an ignoble desire to save a bit on the weekly books, he had allowed love of gold to win the battle. Instead of a cosy bedroom at the Hall, he had given his brother-in-law a houseboat which, even when new, had scarcely been fit for human habitation.

Sitting there at the wheel of her Widgeon Seven, Jane blushed with shame for her parsimonious parent. This infamy, she felt, must end. If Conscience was unable to convince him how wrong it was to behave like a comic-supplement Scotsman, the matter must be taken out of his hands. From the doctor's door she proposed to drive Mr Bulpitt straight to Walsingford Hall and
there deposit him, to be nursed back to health and strength. Even Buck, she felt, obsessed though he was by that Aberdonian urge of his to keep expenses down, would have to admit that this broken man could not be left alone on a houseboat.

She had reached this conclusion, and was feeling brighter and happier, as girls do when they have made up their minds to start something, when a voice spoke, a high-pitched, squeaky voice, like that of a ventriloquist's dummy, and she became aware that she was being addressed by the driver of the charabanc. He had left his post and was standing a few feet away, gazing at Mr Bulpitt with undisguised interest.

'I beg your pardon?' she said – a little coldly, for she had wanted to be alone with her thoughts. Moreover, Joe's outstanding villainy had given her a temporary prejudice against men. With every wish to be broad-minded, a girl cannot welcome conversation with members of a sex which includes people like Joe Vanringham.

The driver of the charabanc was a small, sharp-nosed individual who looked like a pimply weasel. As he stood staring at Mr Bulpitt, every pimple on his face was alive with curiosity. The injured man was now leaning back with closed eyes in a kind of dull stupor of resignation. He had come to the conclusion that nothing could bridge the gulfs of misunderstanding which yawned between himself and his rescuers, and that his only course was to be patient till he had seen the doctor, whose trained senses would immediately detect where the trouble lay. Following Joe's advice, he was relaxing. And he presented such a striking resemblance to a newspaper photograph of the victim of a hatchet murder that the Weasel, who had opened his remarks with the words 'Lor lumme,' proceeded immediately to probe into first causes.

He pointed an interested cigarette.

'Woss the matter wiv'im?'

If he had hoped for a burst of animated girlish confidences, he was disappointed. Jane's manner remained cold and reserved, and she replied aloofly:

'He has been hurt.'

'I'll say he's been hurt! Lord love a duck! Wot happened? Jawernaccident?'

'No,' said Jane, and her foot began to tap on the floor of the Widgeon. It seemed to her that Joe had had time by now to ascertain the addresses of ten doctors.

Her response evidently struck the Weasel as childish. His manner took on a touch of severity, like that of a prosecuting counsel who intends to stand no nonsense from an evasive witness. He frowned and placed his cigarette behind his ear, the better to conduct the cross-examination.

'Wodyer mean?' he demanded.

Jane gazed into the middle distance.

'Wodyer mean, you didn't tawernaccident?' persisted the Weasel. 'You muster radernaccident. Look at the pore bloke. 'Is features are a masker blood.' He paused for a moment, awaiting a reply. 'Bleedin' profusely,' he added. Then, with stiffness: 'I said 'is features was a masker blood.'

'I heard you,' said Jane.

Her brusqueness affected the Weasel unpleasantly. Even at the beginning of this interview, he had been in none too amiable a mood, owing to the fact that his passengers, absorbed in their own selfish thirsts, had poured into the public house, intent on slaking them, without thinking to invite him to join them in a gargle. He was now thoroughly stirred up and ripe for the class war. Jane's was a delicate beauty which, as a rule, made men with
whom she came in contact feel chivalrous and protective. It merely awoke the Weasel's worst feelings. There had been a patrician hauteur in her voice which made him wish that Stalin could have been there to give her a piece of his mind.

'Ho!' he said.

Jane said nothing.

'Ask you a civil question, and you bite at a man.'

Jane did not reply.

'Think you're everybody,' proceeded the Weasel, in Stalin's absence doing his best to handle the affair with spirit, but a little conscious that the latter would have said something snappier than that.

Jane gazed before her.

'It's women like you that cause the Death Toll of the Roads,' said the Weasel bitterly.

'Woddidesay?' inquired a new voice.

''E said that it's women like 'er that cause the Death Toll of the Roads,' replied another. And, looking round, Jane perceived that what had begun as a duologue had become a symposium.

As a centre of life and thought, the High Street of Walsingford, like the High Streets of other English country towns, varied according to the day of the week. On Saturdays and market days it was virtually a modern Babylon, at other times less bustling and congested. This was one of its medium afternoons. There were no farmers in gaiters prodding pigs in the ribs, but a fair assortment of residents had turned out, and half a dozen of these, male and female, were now gathered about the two-seater. And once more, much as she disliked him, Jane wished Joe would return.

As the eyes of those present fell upon Mr Bulpitt, a startled gasp of horror arose.

'Coo!' said a citizen in a bowler hat.

'Look at 'im!' said a woman in a cricket cap.

'Yus,' cried the Weasel, driving home his point, 'look at 'im. Bleedin' profusely. And does she care?'

The man in the bowler hat seemed staggered.

'Don't she care?'

'No! Don't give a damn, she don't.'

'Coo!' said the man in the bowler hat, and the woman in the cricket cap drew in her breath with a sharp hiss.

Jane stirred indignantly in her seat. There are few things more exasperating to an innocent girl who prides herself on the almost religious carefulness of her driving than to be thrust into the position of a haughty and callous aristocrat of the old pre-Revolution French regime, the sort of person who used to bowl over the children of the proletariat in his barouche and get fists shaken at him, and she found her temper mounting.

And she was about to deliver a hot denial of the charge, when it suddenly occurred to Mr Bulpitt, who had been listening with some interest to the exchanges, to try to put everything right with a brief address to the crowd. He rose, accordingly, and began to speak.

The result was sensational. His appearance alone had been enough to purify the citizenry of Walsingford with pity and terror. That awful, wordless babble appalled them.

'Coo!' said the man in the bowler hat, summing up the general sentiment.

The Weasel was looking like a prosecuting counsel who has produced his star witness and completed his case. He took the cigarette from behind his ear and pointed it dramatically.

' 'Ark! Trying to talk, but can't. Jaw dislocated, if not broken.'

'What he wants,' said the clear-seeing man in the bowler hat, 'is to tell us 'ow it' appened.'

'I know' ow it 'appened,' said the woman in the cricket cap. 'I saw the 'ole thing.'

At any unpleasantness involving an automobile there is always to be found in the crowd which assembles a woman of the type to which this one belonged, not necessarily in a cricket cap but invariably endowed with the quick and imaginative mind that goes with that rather eccentric headgear. When bigger and better revolutions are made, women of this kind will make them.

She had got the ear of her audience. The crowd, sated with gazing upon the victim, gave her a ready attention.

'You saw it?'

'R. Saw the 'ole thing from beginning to end. Came round the corner at fifty miles an hour, she did.'

'Driving to the public danger?' asked the man in the bowler hat.

'You may well say so!'

'Coo!' said the man in the bowler hat. 'Comes of bits of girls like her 'aving cars. Didn't ought to be allowed.'

'A menace,' agreed the Weasel vengefully. 'Causes the growing mortality. And what does she care? Not a damn.'

'S'pose she thinks the road belongs to 'er.'

'R. Fifty miles an hour round the corner. And didn't even toot her rorn.'

'Didn't even toot her rorn?'

'Couldn't be bothered. So what chance had the pore gentleman got? She was on him before he could so much as utter a cry.'

'If I was 'er father,' said the Weasel, abandoning his impersonation of a prosecuting counsel and becoming the judge
pronouncing sentence, I'd give her a spanking. And I've a good mind to do it, even if I'm not.'

The words definitely enhanced the delicacy of the situation. It was the first suggestion that had been made in the direction of a practical move, and it was greeted with a murmur of approval. Censorious looks were cast at Jane, and it was while she sat trying to crush down a growing apprehension which her proud spirit resented that Joe came out of the public house.

'Sorry I've been so long,' he said. The boys and I got discussing the situation in Spain.'

He stopped. It was borne in upon him that the situation in Walsingford also called for attention. In addition to the foundation members, the crowd had now become augmented by a number of rather tough eggs from the biscuit factory down the road. Walsingford is the home of the Booth and Baxter Biscuit, and those engaged in its manufacture appeared to have been selected more for their muscular development than for their social polish. They were large, hearty fellows in shirt sleeves whose instinct, when confronted with the unusual, was to make rude noises and throw stones. They had not yet begun to throw stones, but the noises they were making were so undisguisedly rude that Joe, at a loss to understand their emotion, leaned across Mr Bulpitt and addressed Jane in an interested aside.

'What's all this? A civic welcome? But how did they know who I was?'

Jane was in no mood for persiflage, particularly from such a source. His advent had stilled to some extent the fluttering of her heart, but she disliked having to converse with him. It irked her that the peculiar circumstances made it impossible for her to look through him in silence.