Uncle Fred in the Springtime (13 page)

‘It is
a most admirable idea.’

‘Don’t
mention my name, of course.’

‘My
dear Ickenham, you may trust me to exercise perfect discretion. The whole thing
will be perfectly casual. I shall embark on our little talk quite simply and
naturally by asking him if he can oblige me with a match.’

‘Genius!’
said Lord Ickenham.

The
silence which followed Sir Roderick’s departure was broken by a groan from
Pongo.

‘I knew
something like this would happen,’ he said.

‘But my
dear boy,’ protested Lord Ickenham, ‘what has happened, except that I have been
refreshed by an intelligent chat with a fine mind, and have picked up some
hints on deportment for brain specialists which should prove invaluable? The
old Gawd-help-us will alight at Oxford—’

‘So
will I jolly well alight at Oxford!’

‘And
return to your flat? I wonder if you will find Erb waiting for you on the
doorstep?’

‘Oh,
gosh!’

‘Yes, I
thought you had overlooked that point. Pull yourself together, my dear Pongo.
Stiffen the sinews, summon up the blood. Everything is going to be all right.
You seem thoughtful, Polly.’

‘I was
only wondering why Lord Emsworth called him Pimples.’

‘You
mean he hasn’t any now? No, I noticed that,’ said Lord Ickenham. ‘It is often
the way. We start out in life with more pimples than we know what to do with,
and in the careless arrogance of youth think they are going to last for ever.
But comes a day when we suddenly find that we are down to our last half-dozen.
And then those go. There is a lesson in this for all of us. Ah, Glossop, what
news from the front?’

Sir
Roderick Glossop radiated satisfaction.

‘You
were perfectly correct, my dear Ickenham. Absolutely nothing wrong. No
indication whatsoever of any egg-fixation. There was no basis at all for Lady
Constance’s alarm. I should describe the man as exceptionally intelligent. But
I was surprised to find him so young.’

‘We all
were once.’

‘True.
But I had imagined from Lady Constance’s letter that he was far older. Whether
she said so or not, I cannot recall, but the impression I gathered was that he
was a contemporary of Emsworth’s.’

‘Probably
looks younger than he is. The country air. Or as a child he may have been fed
on Bevo.’

‘Ah,’
said Sir Roderick non-committally. ‘Well, if I am to leave the train at Oxford,
I must be getting back to my compartment and collecting my things. It has been
a great pleasure meeting you again, Ickenham, and I am exceedingly obliged for
that very thoughtful suggestion of yours. I confess that I was not looking
forward to an early morning journey. Goodbye.’

‘Goodbye.’

‘Goodbye,’
said Pongo, speaking last and speaking with difficulty. He had been sitting
for some moments in a deep silence, broken only by an occasional sharp,
whistling intake of breath. Sir Roderick carried away with him an impression of
a sombre and introspective young man. He mentioned him later in a lecture to
the Mothers of West Kensington as an example of the tendency of post-war youth
towards a brooding melancholia.

Lord
Ickenham, too, seemed to feel that he needed cheering up, and for the remainder
of the journey spared no effort to amuse and entertain. All through the
afternoon he maintained a high level of sprightliness and gaiety, and it was
only when they had alighted at Market Blandings station that he found himself
compelled to strike a jarring note.

Market
Blandings station, never a congested area, was this evening more than usually
somnolent and deserted. Its only occupants were a porter and a cat. The swarthy
young man got out and walked to the end of the train, where the porter was
extracting luggage from the van. Polly wandered off to fraternize with the cat.
And Lord Ickenham, having bought Pongo a pennyworth of butterscotch from the
slot machine, was just commenting on the remissness of his host and hostess in
not sending anyone down to meet so distinguished a guest, when there came on to
the platform a solid man in the middle thirties. The afterglow of the sunset
lit up his face, and it was at this point that Lord Ickenham struck the jarring
note.

‘I
wonder if you remember, Pongo,’ he said, ‘that when you looked in on me at
Ickenham the day before yesterday I mentioned that it had always been the
ambition of my life to play the confidence trick on someone? Owing to all the
rush and bustle of this Emsworth business, I quite forgot to tell you that
yesterday morning the opportunity arose.’

‘What!’

‘Yes.
Before coming to the Drones, I went to call on Horace Davenport, and finding
him not at home, waited for a while in the street outside his flat. And while I
was doing so a pink chap came along, and it seemed to me that if ever I was
going to make the experiment, now was the time. There was something about this
fellow that told me that I could never hope for a better subject. And so it
proved. He handed me over his wallet, and I walked off with it. The whole
affair was a triumph of mind over matter, and I am modestly proud of it.’

It had
always been an axiom with Pongo Twistleton that his Uncle Fred was one of those
people who ought not to be allowed at large, but he had never suspected that
the reasons for not allowing him at large were so solidly based as this. He
clutched his brow.’ As had happened that day at the Dog Races, this man seemed
to have taken him into a strange nightmare world.

‘I sent
the wallet back, of course. My interest in the experiment was purely
scientific. I had no thought of vulgar gain. The chap’s card was inside, and I
shipped it off by registered post. And the reason why I mention it now…. Do
you see the fellow coming along the platform?’

Pongo
turned an ashen face.

‘You
don’t mean —?’

‘Yes,’
said Lord Ickenham, with a breezy insouciance which cut his nephew like a
knife, ‘that’s the chap.’

9

‘His name,’ said Lord
Ickenham, ‘is Bosham. It was on the card I found in his wallet. But I
distinctly remember that the address on the card was some place down in
Hampshire, not far from my own little dosshouse, so it seems extremely odd that
he should be here. It looks to me like one of those strained coincidences which
are so inartistic. Unless he’s a ghost.’

Pongo,
who might have been taken for one himself by a short-sighted man, found speech.
For some moments he had been squeaking and gibbering like the sheeted dead in
the Roman streets a little ere the mightiest Julius fell.

‘Bosham
is Lord Emsworth’s son,’ he said hollowly.

‘Is he,
indeed? I am not very well up in the
Peerage.
I seldom read it except to
get a laugh out of the names. Then that explains it,’ said Lord Ickenham
heartily. ‘He must have been on a visit to Blandings, and when he ran up to
London for the day to get his hair cut the Duke told him on no account to fail,
while there, to go and slap his nephew Horace on the back and give him his
best. It was perfectly natural that his pilgrimage to Bloxham Mansions should
chance to synchronize with mine. How simple these apparently extraordinary
things are, when you go into them.’

‘He’s
coming this way.

‘He
would be. I presume he is here to escort us to the castle.’

‘But,
dash it, what are you going to do?’

‘Do?
Why, nothing.’

‘Well,
I’ll bet he will. Do you mean to tell me that if a chap has the confidence
trick played on him by a chap, and meets the chap again, he isn’t going to set
about the chap?’

‘My
dear boy, for a young man who has enjoyed the advantage of having a refined
uncle constantly at his elbow, you seem singularly ignorant of the manners and
customs of good society. We bloods do not make scenes in public places.’

‘You
think he will wait till later before having you pinched?’

Lord
Ickenham clicked his tongue.

‘My
dear Pongo, you have a gift for taking the dark view that amounts almost to
genius. I should imagine that the prophet Isaiah as a young man must have been
very like you. Tell me — I don’t want to turn till I can see the whites of his
eyes — where is our friend? Does he approach?’

‘He’s
sort of backing and filling at the moment.’

‘I
quite understand. It is the decent diffidence of the English upper classes. All
his life he has been brought up in the creed that there is nothing that is more
beastly bad form than accosting a stranger, and he is wondering if I am indeed
the Sir Glossop of whom he has heard so much. He shrinks from taking a chance.
I think it must be your presence that is bothering him. No doubt Emsworth
completely forgot to mention that I should be accompanied by my secretary, and
this has made him confused. “It may be Glossop,” he is saying to himself. “I
wouldn’t be prepared to bet it isn’t Glossop. But if it is Glossop, who’s the
chap with him? There was nothing in my instructions about chaps-with-Glossop.”
And so he backs and fills. Well, this gives us time to go further into the
matter we were discussing. What on earth leads you to suppose that this Bosham
will denounce me for having played the confidence trick on him? The moment I
say that I am Sir Roderick Glossop, the eagerly awaited guest, he will naturally
assume that he was deceived by a chance resemblance. Where is he now?’

‘Just
abaft the try-your-weight machine.’

‘Then
watch me turn and nonplus him,’ said Lord Ickenham, and pivoted gracefully. ‘Excuse
me, sir,’ he said. ‘I wonder if you could inform me if there is any possibility
of my obtaining a vehicle of some sort here, to take me to Blandings Castle?’

He had
not overestimated the effect of his manoeuvre. Lord Bosham halted as if he had
walked into a lamp-post, and stood gaping.

The
heir to the Earldom of Emsworth was a slow thinker, but he was not incapable of
inductive reasoning. He had been told to meet an elderly gentleman who would
arrive on the two-forty-five train en route for Blandings Castle. The only
elderly gentleman who had arrived on the two-forty-five train en route for
Blandings Castle was the elderly gentleman before him. This elderly gentleman,
therefore, must be that elderly gentleman. In which case, he was Sir Roderick
Glossop, the eminent brain specialist, and so could not be, as in that first
instant of seeing his face he had been prepared to swear he was, the pleasant
stranger who had relieved him of his wallet in Park Lane.

For
Lord Bosham, though he lived a secluded life in a remote corner of Hampshire,
was sufficiently in touch with things to know that eminent brain specialists do
not go about playing the confidence trick on people. Every young man starting
out in the world, he was aware, has his choice. He can become an eminent brain
specialist, or he can become a confidence trickster. But not both.

‘Are
you Sir Roderick Glossop?’ he asked, his round eyes drinking in those features
that had seemed so familiar.

‘That
is my name.’

‘Oh?
Ah? Mine’s Bosham. We — er — we haven’t met before, by any chance?’

‘Unfortunately,
no. The loss,’ said Lord Ickenham, courteously but inaccurately, was mine. But
I have heard of you. When I saw him yesterday, Lord Emsworth spoke with a
fatherly warmth of your many gifts.’

‘Ah?
Well, I tooled down in the car to meet you.’

‘Vastly
civil of you, my dear Bosham.’

‘You’ve
got some luggage in the van, I take it, what? I’ll slide along and see to it.’ ‘Thank
you, thank you.’

‘Then
we can tool up to the castle.’

‘Precisely
what I would have suggested myself. Is there a large party there?’

‘Eh?
Oh, no. Only my father and my aunt and the Duke and Horace Davenport.’

‘Horace
Davenport?’

‘The
Duke’s nephew. Well, I’ll be sliding along and seeing about that luggage.’ He
slid, and Pongo resumed his imitation of the sheeted dead.

‘Well?’
he said, at length becoming coherent. ‘Now what? On arrival at this ghastly
castle, we shall immediately find ourselves cheek by jowl with a chap who knows
you, knows Miss Pott and has been a close pal of mine for years. “Hullo, Pongo!”
he will say, bounding up, as we stand chatting with Lady Constance. “Hullo,
Lord Ickenham! Golly, Polly, isn’t this jolly, here we all are, what?” If you
have .nothing else to do at the moment, you might be trying that one over on
your bazooka.’

Lord
Ickenham did not reply. He was looking down the platform. At the far end, a reunion
seemed to be taking place between Lord Bosham and the swarthy young man who had
occupied the adjoining compartment on the train. They had just shaken hands,
and were now engaged in conversation.

‘You
were saying, my boy?’ he asked, coming out of his thoughts.

Pongo
repeated the substance of his remarks.

‘Yes, I
see what you mean,’ agreed Lord Ickenham. ‘You must always remember, however,
that there is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so. Still, in
feeling that a problem has arisen I am not saying that you are not right. I
confess that I had not anticipated Horace. Fate seems to have arranged that
this shall be Old Home Week at Blandings Castle. We only need Mustard Pott and
my dear wife to have what you might call a full hand.’