Uncle Dynamite (22 page)

‘Like
Slimmo.’

‘This
afternoon a man I don’t remember from Adam comes and insinuates himself into
the house, saying he is an old schoolfellow of mine. Tonight Potter catches a
woman prowling in my garden —‘

‘Not so
much prowling, sir, as lurking.’

‘SHUT
UP!’

‘Yes,
sir.’

‘Potter
catches a woman prowling in my garden, obviously trying to establish communication
with some man in the house. Who was that man?’

‘Ah.’

‘It
wasn’t me.’

‘One
hopes not, Mugsy.’

‘It
wasn’t William. It wasn’t that boy who was in here just now, the one that
cleans the knives and boots —‘

‘How do
you know? If I were you, I would watch that boy, watch him closely.’

‘It was
presumably not Reginald, seeing that Reginald really is Reginald. That leaves
you.’

‘But,
Mugsy, this is absurd. You say this woman was trying to establish communication
with some man in the house. Why? What possible evidence have you of that? I see
her as some poor, homeless waif who wandered into your garden trying to find
shelter for the night in the tool shed or the byre, whatever a byre may be —‘

‘Poor,
homeless waif be damned. And if she was trying to find shelter in the tool
shed, why didn’t she go there, instead of hanging about —‘

‘Loitering
suspiciously, sir.’

‘SHUT
UP! Instead of hanging about outside the window of my collection room. She was
one of a gang of burglars, that’s what she was, and I’m going to find out who
the rest of them are. You say you’re Plank. Prove it.’

Lord
Ickenham beamed.

‘My
dear Mugsy, why didn’t you say so at first? Prove it? Of course I can prove it.
But is not the fact that I have been calling you Mugsy from the start in itself
a proof?’

‘No.
You could have found out somewhere that I used to be called that at school.’

‘Then
let us touch on some of the things which I could not have found out except by
actual daily contact with you in those far-off days. Who pinched jam sandwiches
at the school shop, Mugsy? Who put the drawing-pin on the French master’s
chair? Who got six of the best with a fives bat for bullying his juniors? And
talking of bullying juniors, do you recollect one term a frail, golden-haired
child arriving at the old seminary, a frail, wistful child who looked to you
like something sent from heaven? You swooped on that child, Mugsy, as if you
had been an Assyrian coming down like a wolf on the fold. You pulled his golden
hair. You twisted his slender arm. And just as you had started twisting it, it
suddenly uncoiled itself in one of the sweetest left hooks I have ever
witnessed and plugged you in the eye. Ten minutes later, after we had helped
you to bed, investigation revealed that the child was the previous year’s
public-school bantam-weight champion, who had been transferred to us from his
former place of education because his father thought the air in our part of the
world was better for his lungs. On another occasion —‘

He
paused. A horrible cackling sound, like a turkey with laryngitis, had
interrupted the flow of his narrative. It was Constable Potter laughing. He was
not a man who laughed easily, and he had not wanted to laugh now. He had,
indeed, tried not to laugh. But his sense of the humorous had been too much for
him.

‘Uck,
uck, uck,’ he gurgled, and Sir Aylmer turned on him with all the fury of a
bantam-weight champion whose arm has been twisted.

‘POTTER!’

‘S-sir?’

‘Get
out! What the devil are you doing, lounging about in here, when you ought to be
finding that woman you were fool enough to let escape?’

The
rebuke sobered Constable Potter. He saw that he had been remiss.

‘Yes,
sir.’

‘What
do you mean, Yes, sir?’

‘I mean
No, sir. I mean I’ll start instituting a search instanter. It oughtn’t to be so
hard to find her. She’ll be practically in the nood, as the expression is, and
that,’ said Constable Potter who, when he thought at all, thought clearly,
‘will render her conspicuous.’

With a
courteous inclination of the head he passed through the door, stern and
vigilant, and Sir Aylmer prepared to follow his example.

‘I’m
off to bed,’ he said shortly. ‘It must be
two o’clock
.’

‘Past
two,’ said Lord Ickenham, consulting his watch. ‘How time flies when one is
agreeably occupied. Then let us all go to bed.’

He
linked his arm in that of Pongo, who was breathing stertorously like a fever
patient, and together they made their way up the stairs.

The bedroom which had been
allotted to Lord Ickenham was a spacious apartment on the second floor, looking
out over the park. It was thither that he conducted Pongo, bringing him to rest
on the chaise-longue which stood beside the window.

‘Relax,
my boy,’ he said, tidying up his nephew’s legs, which were showing a tendency
to straggle, and gently placing a cushion behind his head. ‘You seem a little
overwrought. You remind me of an old
New York
friend of mine named Bream Rockmeteller on the occasion one Fourth
of July when somebody touched off a maroon beneath his chair. That same stunned
look. Odd. I should have thought that the clearing up of that Edwin Smith
misunderstanding would have made you feel as if you had just had a fortnight at
Bracing Bognor.’

Pongo
sat up, his legs once more shooting out in all directions.

‘Come,
come,’ said Lord Ickenham, rearranging them. ‘Are you a man or an octopus? One
ought to tie you up with a system of ropes.’

Pongo
ignored the rebuke. His eyes were stony.

‘Uncle
Fred,’ he said, speaking in a low, metallic voice, ‘I don’t know if you know
it, but you’re Public Scourge Number One. You scatter ruin and desolation on
every side like a ruddy sower going forth sowing. Life, liberty and the pursuit
of happiness aren’t possible when you’re around. You’re like the Black Death or
one of those pestilences of the Middle Ages, taking their toll of thousands.’

His
vehemence seemed to occasion Lord Ickenham a mild surprise.

‘But,
my dear boy, what have I done?’

‘All
that stuff about my giving a false name at the Dog Races.’

‘Well,
I’m dashed. I was looking on that as my day’s good deed. But for my timely
intervention —

‘I was
just going to deny the whole thing, when you butted in.’

Lord
Ickenham shook his head.

‘You
would never have got away with it. Heaven knows that there are few more fervent
apostles of the creed of stout denial than myself — I have been practising it
for thirty years with your aunt — but it would not have served here. The
copper’s word would have been accepted, and you would have been branded in
Mugsy’s eyes as a burglar.’

‘Well,
look what I’m branded in his eyes as now. A chap who goes on toots and gets
pinched at Dog Races. What’s Hermione going to say when he tells her about it?
The moment the facts are placed before her, she’ll sit down and write me a
stinker, calling our engagement off.’

‘You
think so?’

‘I can
see her dipping the pen.’

‘Well,
that’ll be good. If I were you, I would give three rousing cheers and let it go
at that.’

‘I
won’t give three rousing cheers. I worship that girl. Until now —‘

‘I
know, I know. You have never known what love meant. Quite. Nevertheless, I stick
to it that you would be well out of this perilous enterprise of trying to hitch
up with a girl who appears to have the austere outlook of the head mistress of
a kindergarten and will probably spend most of her married life rapping her
husband on the knuckles with a ruler. But we mustn’t sit yarning about your
amours now. There are graver matters on which we have to rivet our attention.’

‘Such
as —?‘

‘My
dear Pongo, Sally. Is it nothing to you that she is at this moment roaming Hampshire
in her cami-knickers? Where’s your chivalry?’

Pongo
bowed his head in shame. No appeal to the
preux chevalier
in him was
ever wasted. The thought that he had forgotten about Sally was a knife in his
bosom.

‘Oh,
golly. Yes, that’s right. She’ll catch cold.’

‘If
nothing worse.’

‘And
may be gathered in by Potter.’

‘Exactly.’

‘Blast
him.’

‘Yes, I
confess to feeling a little cross with Constable Potter, and in the deepest and
truest sense it will be all right with me if he trips over a footprint and
breaks his damned neck. In trying to cope with Constable Potter one has the
sense of being up against some great natural force. I wouldn’t have thought so
much zeal could have been packed into a blue uniform and a pair of number
eleven boots. Well, see you shortly, Pongo.’

‘Where
are you going?’

‘Out
into the great open spaces,’ said Lord Ickenham, picking up a flowered
dressing-gown. ‘God knows where Sally is, but she can’t have got far. As Potter
said, she will be conspicuous.’

‘Shall
I come, too?’

‘No,’
said Lord Ickenham. ‘We don’t want the thing to look like one of those great
race movements. You stay here and think calm, healing thoughts.’

He left
the room, walking like one who intends not to let a twig snap beneath his feet,
and Pongo leaned back against the cushion and closed his eyes.

‘Healing
thoughts!’ he said to himself bitterly, and laughed one of his mirthless
laughs.

But the
human mind is capable of strange feats. You never know where you are with it.
If questioned at the moment when the door had closed as to the chances of
anything in the nature of a healing thought coming into a mind that was more
like a maelstrom than a collection of grey cells, Pongo would have offered a
hundred to eight against and been surprised if there had been any takers. Yet
now, gradually, he discovered that one was beginning to shape itself.

As if
painted inflame, the picture of the whisky decanter which he had left standing
on the round table in the drawing-room, at least half of its elixir still
within it, started to rise before his mental retina, and he sat up, the light
of hope dawning in his eyes. He had tested the magic properties of that
decanter before, and they had in no way fallen short of his dreams, and now
there came upon him the urge to test them again. Reason told him that he would
never need one for the tonsils more than in the present pass to which he had
been reduced. In fact, added Reason, the first thing any good specialist,
seeing him, would recommend — nay, insist on — was a little something in a
glass.

Thirty
seconds later he had begun his journey to the promised land, and a couple of
minutes after that was sitting in his favourite armchair with his feet up,
almost calm again. It was very pleasant in the quiet drawing-room, very
pleasant and restorative and soothing. At least, it was for perhaps a quarter
of an hour. At the end of that period Sir Aylmer Bostock entered in his
dressing-gown. Tossing on his pillow after having had his beauty sleep twice
broken, Sir Aylmer had bethought him of the decanter and it had drawn him like
a magnet. Experience had taught him that the most stubborn insomnia can often
be corrected by means of a couple of quick ones.

His
emotions on beholding Pongo established at the fountain-head were sharp and
poignant. Although he had been compelled to abandon his view of this young man
as a rat of the underworld, he still considered him a rat, and the last thing
he desired was a jolly party with him at half-past two in the morning, the
glasses clinking and the conversation flowing free. Life, he was thinking, was
difficult enough without finding Pongo under one’s feet wherever one went. If
Sir Aylmer Bostock after two days of his future son-in-law’s society had been
asked to sketch out a brief description of his ideal world, he would have
replied that he was not a fussy man and did not expect perfection but that he
did insist on one thing, that it should contain fewer and better Twistletons.

‘Ugh!’
he said. ‘You!’

There
are extraordinarily few good answers to the ejaculation ‘You!’ especially when
preceded by the monosyllable ‘Ugh!’ Pongo could not think of any of them. The
other’s entry had caused him to repeat that sitting high jump of his, and on
descending from the neighbourhood of the ceiling he had found his mind a blank.
The best he could achieve was a nervous giggle.

This
was unfortunate, for we have made no secret of Sir Aylmer Bostock’s views on
nervous gigglers. The ex-Governor had never actually fallen on a nervous
giggler and torn him limb from limb, but that was simply because he had not
wanted to get himself involved in a lot of red tape. But he definitely did not
like them. He glared at Pongo, and as he glared observed the glass in the
latter’s hand, and it was as if someone had whispered in his ear ‘What is wrong
with this picture?’