Uncle Dynamite (4 page)

‘Sally’s
got too much sense.’

‘The
most level-headed girls often prove perfect mugs where a loved brother is
concerned. At any rate, in answer to a recent communication of mine telling her
that I hoped shortly to be in
London
and would like her to keep an evening free for dinner I got a
letter saying she was glad I was coming up, because she wanted to see me on a
very urgent matter. She underlined the “very”. I didn’t like the ring of that
statement. It was the sort of thing you used to write to me in the old days,
when you were having a passing unpleasantness with your bookie and hoped to
float a small loan. Well, I shall be seeing her tomorrow, and I will institute
a probe. Poor little Sally, I hope to God she’s all right. What an admirable
girl she is.’

‘Yes.’

‘You
still feel that, do you?’

‘Oh,
rather. I’m frightfully fond of Sally. I tried to do her a bit of good just
before I left for
America
.
Hermione told me old Bostock wanted a bust of himself, to present to the
village club, and I got her to put him on to Sally. I thought she might be glad
of the commish.’

‘Well,
well. An impulsive girl would be touched by a thing like that. Yes, indeed.
“The whitest man I know,” one can hear her saying. I believe, if you played
your cards right, you could still marry her, Pongo.’

‘Aren’t
you overlooking the trifling fact that I happen to be engaged to Hermione?’

‘Slide
out of it.’

‘Ha!’

‘It is
what your best friends would advise. You are a moody, introspective young man,
all too prone to look on the dark side of things. I shall never forget you that
day at the Dog Races. Sombre is the only word to describe your attitude as the
cop’s fingers closed on your coat collar. You reminded me of Hamlet. What you
need is a jolly, lively wife to take you out of yourself, the sort of wife who
would set booby traps for the Bishop when he came to spend the night. I don’t
suppose this Hermione Bostock of yours ever made so much as an apple-pie bed in
her life. I’d give her a miss. Send her an affectionate telegram saying you’ve
changed your mind and it’s all off. I have a telegraph form in my study.’

A look
of intense devoutness came over Pongo’s face.

‘For
your information, Uncle Fred, wild horses wouldn’t make me break my engagement.’

‘Most
unlikely they’ll ever try.’

‘I
worship that girl. There’s nothing I wouldn’t do for her. Well, to give you a
rough idea, I told her I was a teetotaller. And why? Purely because she
happened one day to express the hope that I wasn’t like so many of these modern
young suction pumps, always dropping in at bars and lowering a couple for the
tonsils. “Me?” I said. “Good Lord, no. I never touch the stuff.” That’ll show
you.’

‘So
when you get to Ashenden —’

‘—
They’ll uncork the barley water and bring on the lemonade. I know. I’ve
foreseen that. It’ll be agony, but I can take it. For her sake. I worship her,
I tell you. If H. Bostock isn’t an angel in human shape, then I don’t know an
angel in human shape when I see one. Until now I have never known what love
was.’

‘Well,
you have had ample opportunity of finding out. I have watched you with tender
solicitude through about fifty-seven romances, starting with that freckled child
with the missing front tooth at the dancing class, who blacked your eye with a
wooden dumb-bell when you kissed her in the cloak-room, and ending with this —‘

Lord
Ickenham paused, and Pongo eyed him narrowly.

‘Well?
This what?’

‘This
gruesome combination of George Eliot, Boadicea and the late Mrs Carrie Nation,’
said Lord Ickenham. ‘This flashing-eyed governess. This twenty-minute egg with
whom no prudent man would allow himself to walk alone down a dark alley.’

It was
enough. Pongo rose, a dignified figure.

‘Shall
we join the ladies?’ he said coldly.

‘There
aren’t any,’ said Lord Ickenham.

‘I
don’t know why I said that,’ said Pongo, annoyed. ‘What I meant was, let’s stop
talking bally rot and go and have a game of billiards.’

3

It was with a light heart
and a gay tra-la-la on his lips that Pongo Twistleton set out for Ashenden
Manor on the following afternoon, leaving Lord Ickenham, who was not embarking
on his metropolitan jaunt till a few hours later, waving benevolently from the
front steps.

Nothing
so braces a young man in love as the consciousness of having successfully
resisted a Tempter who has tried to lure him into a course of action of which
the adored object would not approve: and as he recalled the splendid firmness
with which he had tied the can to his Uncle Fred’s suggestion of a pleasant and
instructive afternoon in London, Pongo felt spiritually uplifted.

Pleasant
and instructive afternoon, forsooth! Few people have ever come nearer to saying
‘Faugh!’ than did Pongo as Lord Ickenham’s phrase shot through his wincing mind
like some loathsome serpent. The crust of the old buster, daring to suggest
pleasant and instructive afternoons to a man who had put that sort of thing
behind him once and for all. With a shudder of distaste he thrust the whole
degrading episode into the hinterland of his consciousness, and turned his
thoughts to a more agreeable theme, the coming meeting with Hermione’s parents.

This,
he was convinced, was going to be a riot from the word Go. He had little data
about these two old geezers, of course, but he presumed that they were
intelligent old geezers, able to spot a good man when they saw one, and it
seemed, accordingly, pretty obvious that a fellow like himself — steady,
upright, impervious to avuncular wheedlings and true blue from soup to nuts —
would have them eating out of his hand in the first minute. ‘My dear, he’s
charming!’
they would write to Hermione, and bluff Sir Aylmer, whom he pictured as a
sort of modern Cheeryble Brother, would say to Lady Bostock (gentle,
sweet-faced, motherly), as they toddled up to bed at the conclusion of a
delightful first evening, ‘Gad, my dear, nothing much wrong with
that
young
chap, what?’ — or possibly ‘What, what?’ He looked forward with bright
confidence to grappling them to his soul with hoops of steel.

It was
consequently with some annoyance that he found on reaching his destination that
there was going to be a slight delay before this desirable state of affairs
could be consummated. The first essential preliminary to grappling a
householder and his wife to your soul with hoops of steel is that you should be
able to get into the house they are holding, and this, he discovered, presented
unforeseen difficulties.

Ashenden
Manor was one of those solidly built edifices which date from the days when a
home was not so much a place for putting on the old slippers and lighting the
pipe, as a fortress to be defended against uncouth intruders with battering
rams. Its front door was stout and massive, and at the moment tightly closed. Furthermore,
the bell appeared to be out of order. He leaned against the button with his
full weight for a while, but it soon became clear that this was going to get
him nowhere, and the necessity of taking alternative action presented itself.

It was
at this point that he observed not far from where he stood an open French window,
and it seemed to him that he had found a formula. A bit irregular, perhaps, to
start your first visit to a place by strolling in through windows, but a
kindly, hearty old boy like Sir Aylmer Bostock would overlook that. Abandoning
the front door, accordingly, as a lost cause, he stepped through, and an
instant later was experiencing the unpleasant shock which always came to people
who found themselves for the first time in the room where the ex-Governor kept
the African curios which he had collected during his years of honourable exile.
Sir Aylmer Bostock’s collection of African curios was probably the most
hideous, futile and valueless that even an ex-Governor had ever brought home
with him, and many of its items seemed to take Pongo into a different and a
dreadful world.

And he
had picked up and started to scrutinize the nearest to hand, a peculiar sort of
what-not executed in red mud by an artist apparently under the influence of trade
gin, and was wondering why even an untutored African should have been chump
enough to waste on an effort like this hours which might have been more
profitably employed in chasing crocodiles or beaning the neighbours with his
knobkerrie, when a voice, having in it many of the qualities of the Last Trump,
suddenly split the air.

‘REGINALD!’

Starting
violently, Pongo dropped the what-not. It crashed to the floor and became a
mere
macédoine.
A moment later, a burly figure appeared in the doorway,
preceded by a large white moustache.

At about the moment when
Pongo at Ickenham Hall was springing to the wheel of his Buffy-Porson and
pressing a shapely foot on the self-starter, Sir Aylmer Bostock had gone to his
wife’s bedroom on the first floor of Ashenden Manor to mend a broken slat in
the Venetian blind. He was a man who liked to attend to these little domestic
chores himself, and he wanted to have it ready when the
midday
train brought Lady Bostock back from
London
, where she had been spending a week
with her daughter Hermione.

In
predicting that this old schoolmate of his would feel chagrined at Bill
Oakshott’s failure to co-operate in the civic welcome which he had gone to such
trouble to arrange for him, Lord Ickenham had shown sound judgment of character.
When an ex-Governor, accustomed for years to seeing his official receptions go
like clockwork, tastes in a black hour the bitterness of failure and
anti-climax, pique is bound to supervene. Fists will be clenched, oaths
breathed, lower lips bitten. And this is particularly so if the ex-Governor is
one whose mental attitude, even under the most favourable conditions,
resembles, as did Sir Aylmer Bostock’s, that of a trapped cinnamon bear. As he
worked, his brow was dark, his moustache bristling, and from time to time he
snorted in a quiet undertone.

He
yearned for his wife’s company, so that he could pour into her always receptive
ear the story of his wrongs, and soon after he had put the finishing touches to
the broken slat he got it. A cab drove up to the front door, and presently Lady
Bostock appeared, a woman in the late forties who looked like a horse.

‘Oh,
there you are, dear,’ she said brightly. In conversation with her consort she
was nearly always obliged to provide brightness enough for both of them. She
paused, sniffing. ‘What a curious smell there is in here.’

Sir
Aylmer frowned. He resented criticism, even of his smells.

‘Glue,’
he said briefly. ‘I’ve been mending the blind.’

‘Oh,
how clever of you, darling. Thank you so much,’ said Lady Bostock, brighter
than ever. ‘Well, I suppose you thought I was never coming back. It’s lovely to
be home again.
London
was
terribly stuffy. I thought Hermione was looking very well. She sent all sorts
of messages to you and Reginald. Has he arrived yet?’

On the
point of asking who the devil Reginald was, Sir Aylmer remembered that his
daughter had recently become betrothed to some young pot of cyanide answering
to that name. He replied that Reginald had not yet arrived.

‘Hermione
said he was coming today. ‘‘Well, he hasn’t.’

‘Has he
wired?’

‘No.’

‘I
suppose he forgot.’

‘Silly
fatheaded young poop,’ said Sir Aylmer.

Lady
Bostock regarded him anxiously. She seemed to sense in his manner an
anti-Reginald bias, and she knew his work. He was capable, she was aware, when
in anything like shape, of reducing young men who had failed to arouse his
enthusiasm to spots of grease in a matter of minutes, and she was intensely
desirous that no such disaster should occur on the present occasion. Hermione,
seeing her off at
Waterloo
, had
issued definite instructions that her loved one, while at Ashenden Manor, was
to enjoy the status of an ewe lamb, and Hermione was a girl whom it did not do
to cross. She expected people to carry out her wishes, and those who knew what
was good for them invariably did so.

Recalling
all the timid young aides-de-camp whom she had seen curling up at the edges
like scorched paper beneath his glare during those long and happy years in
Lower Barnatoland
, she gazed at her husband
pleadingly.

‘You
will be nice to Reginald, dear, won’t you?’

‘I am
always nice.’

‘I
don’t want him to complain to Hermione about his unwelcome. You know what she
is like.’

A
thoughtful silence fell, as they allowed their minds to dwell on what Hermione
was like. Lady Bostock broke it on a note of hope.

‘You
may become the greatest friends.’

‘Bah!’

‘Hermione
says he is delightful.’