Books: Love Among the Chickens
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P. G. Wodehouse >> Love Among the Chickens
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"I was reading a book," she said, as we stood together watching the
professor shaping at his ball at the other end of the lawn, "by an
author of the same surname as you, Mr. Garnet. Is he a relation of
yours?"
"My name is Jeremy, Miss Derrick."
"Oh, you wrote it?" She turned a little pink. "Then you must have--oh,
nothing."
"I couldn't help it, I'm afraid."
"Did you know what I was going to say?"
"I guessed. You were going to say that I must have heard your
criticisms in the train. You were very lenient, I thought."
"I didn't like your heroine."
"No. What is a 'creature,' Miss Derrick?"
"Pamela in your book is a 'creature,' " she replied unsatisfactorily.
Shortly after this the game came somehow to an end. I do not
understand the intricacies of croquet. But Phyllis did something
brilliant and remarkable with the balls, and we adjourned for tea. The
sun was setting as I left to return to the farm, with Aunt Elizabeth
stored neatly in a basket in my hand. The air was deliciously cool,
and full of that strange quiet which follows soothingly on the skirts
of a broiling midsummer afternoon. Far away, seeming to come from
another world, a sheep-bell tinkled, deepening the silence. Alone in a
sky of the palest blue there gleamed a small, bright star.
I addressed this star.
"She was certainly very nice to me. Very nice indeed." The star said
nothing.
"On the other hand, I take it that, having had a decent up-bringing,
she would have been equally polite to any other man whom she had
happened to meet at her father's house. Moreover, I don't feel
altogether easy in my mind about that naval chap. I fear the worst."
The star winked.
"He calls her Phyllis," I said.
"Charawk!" chuckled Aunt Elizabeth from her basket, in that beastly
cynical, satirical way which has made her so disliked by all right-
thinking people.
CHAPTER VIII
A LITTLE DINNER AT UKRIDGE'S
"Edwin comes to-day," said Mrs. Ukridge.
"And the Derricks," said Ukridge, sawing at the bread in his energetic
way. "Don't forget the Derricks, Millie."
"No, dear. Mrs. Beale is going to give us a very nice dinner. We
talked it over yesterday."
"Who is Edwin?" I asked.
We were finishing breakfast on the second morning after my visit to
the Derricks. I had related my adventures to the staff of the farm on
my return, laying stress on the merits of our neighbours and their
interest in our doings, and the Hired Retainer had been sent off next
morning with a note from Mrs. Ukridge inviting them to look over the
farm and stay to dinner.
"Edwin?" said Ukridge. "Oh, beast of a cat."
"Oh, Stanley!" said Mrs. Ukridge plaintively. "He's not. He's such a
dear, Mr. Garnet. A beautiful, pure-bred Persian. He has taken
prizes."
"He's always taking something. That's why he didn't come down with
us."
"A great, horrid, /beast/ of a dog bit him, Mr. Garnet. And poor
Edwin had to go to a cats' hospital."
"And I hope," said Ukridge, "the experience will do him good. Sneaked
a dog's dinner, Garnet, under his very nose, if you please. Naturally
the dog lodged a protest."
"I'm so afraid that he will be frightened of Bob. He will be very
timid, and Bob's so boisterous. Isn't he, Mr. Garnet?"
"That's all right," said Ukridge. "Bob won't hurt him, unless he tries
to steal his dinner. In that case we will have Edwin made into a rug."
"Stanley doesn't like Edwin," said Mrs. Ukridge, sadly.
Edwin arrived early in the afternoon, and was shut into the kitchen.
He struck me as a handsome cat, but nervous.
The Derricks followed two hours later. Mr. Chase was not of the party.
"Tom had to go to London," explained the professor, "or he would have
been delighted to come. It was a disappointment to the boy, for he
wanted to see the farm."
"He must come some other time," said Ukridge. "We invite inspection.
Look here," he broke off suddenly--we were nearing the fowl-run now,
Mrs. Ukridge walking in front with Phyllis Derrick--"were you ever at
Bristol?"
"Never, sir," said the professor.
"Because I knew just such another fat little buffer there a few years
ago. Gay old bird, he was. He--"
"This is the fowl-run, professor," I broke in, with a moist, tingling
feeling across my forehead and up my spine. I saw the professor
stiffen as he walked, while his face deepened in colour. Ukridge's
breezy way of expressing himself is apt to electrify the stranger.
"You will notice the able way--ha! ha!--in which the wire-netting is
arranged," I continued feverishly. "Took some doing, that. By Jove,
yes. It was hot work. Nice lot of fowls, aren't they? Rather a mixed
lot, of course. Ha! ha! That's the dealer's fault though. We are
getting quite a number of eggs now. Hens wouldn't lay at first.
Couldn't make them."
I babbled on, till from the corner of my eye I saw the flush fade from
the professor's face and his back gradually relax its poker-like
attitude. The situation was saved for the moment but there was no
knowing what further excesses Ukridge might indulge in. I managed to
draw him aside as we went through the fowl-run, and expostulated.
"For goodness sake, be careful," I whispered. "You've no notion how
touchy he is."
"But /I/ said nothing," he replied, amazed.
"Hang it, you know, nobody likes to be called a fat little buffer to
his face."
"What! My dear old man, nobody minds a little thing like that. We
can't be stilted and formal. It's ever so much more friendly to relax
and be chummy."
Here we rejoined the others, and I was left with a leaden foreboding
of gruesome things in store. I knew what manner of man Ukridge was
when he relaxed and became chummy. Friendships of years' standing had
failed to survive the test.
For the time being, however, all went well. In his role of lecturer he
offended no one, and Phyllis and her father behaved admirably. They
received his strangest theories without a twitch of the mouth.
"Ah," the professor would say, "now is that really so? Very
interesting indeed."
Only once, when Ukridge was describing some more than usually original
device for the furthering of the interests of his fowls, did a slight
spasm disturb Phyllis's look of attentive reverence.
"And you have really had no previous experience in chicken-farming?"
she said.
"None," said Ukridge, beaming through his glasses. "Not an atom. But I
can turn my hand to anything, you know. Things seem to come naturally
to me somehow."
"I see," said Phyllis.
It was while matters were progressing with this beautiful smoothness
that I observed the square form of the Hired Retainer approaching us.
Somehow--I cannot say why--I had a feeling that he came with bad news.
Perhaps it was his air of quiet satisfaction which struck me as
ominous.
"Beg pardon, Mr. Ukridge, sir."
Ukridge was in the middle of a very eloquent excursus on the feeding
of fowls, a subject on which he held views of his own as ingenious as
they were novel. The interruption annoyed him.
"Well, Beale," he said, "what is it?"
"That there cat, sir, what came to-day."
"Oh, Beale," cried Mrs. Ukridge in agitation, "/what/ has happened?"
"Having something to say to the missis--"
"What has happened? Oh, Beale, don't say that Edwin has been hurt?
Where is he? Oh, /poor/ Edwin!"
"Having something to say to the missis--"
"If Bob has bitten him I hope he had his nose /well/ scratched," said
Mrs. Ukridge vindictively.
"Having something to say to the missis," resumed the Hired Retainer
tranquilly, "I went into the kitchen ten minutes back. The cat was
sitting on the mat."
Beale's narrative style closely resembled that of a certain book I had
read in my infancy. I wish I could remember its title. It was a well-
written book.
"Yes, Beale, yes?" said Mrs. Ukridge. "Oh, do go on."
" 'Hullo, puss,' I says to him, 'and 'ow are /you/, sir?' 'Be
careful,' says the missis. ' 'E's that timid,' she says, 'you wouldn't
believe,' she says. ' 'E's only just settled down, as you may say,'
she says. 'Ho, don't you fret,' I says to her, ' 'im and me
understands each other. 'Im and me,' I says, 'is old friends. 'E's my
dear old pal, Corporal Banks.' She grinned at that, ma'am, Corporal
Banks being a man we'd 'ad many a 'earty laugh at in the old days. 'E
was, in a manner of speaking, a joke between us."
"Oh, do--go--on, Beale. What has happened to Edwin?"
The Hired Retainer proceeded in calm, even tones.
"We was talking there, ma'am, when Bob, what had followed me unknown,
trotted in. When the cat ketched sight of 'im sniffing about, there
was such a spitting and swearing as you never 'eard; and blowed," said
Mr. Beale amusedly, "blowed if the old cat didn't give one jump, and
move in quick time up the chimney, where 'e now remains, paying no
'eed to the missis' attempts to get him down again."
Sensation, as they say in the reports.
"But he'll be cooked," cried Phyllis, open-eyed.
"No, he won't. Nor will our dinner. Mrs. Beale always lets the kitchen
fire out during the afternoon. And how she's going to light it with
that----"
There was a pause while one might count three. It was plain that the
speaker was struggling with himself.
"--that cat," he concluded safely, "up the chimney? It's a cold dinner
we'll get to-night, if that cat doesn't come down."
The professor's face fell. I had remarked on the occasion when I had
lunched with him his evident fondness for the pleasures of the table.
Cold impromptu dinners were plainly not to his taste.
We went to the kitchen in a body. Mrs. Beale was standing in front of
the empty grate, making seductive cat-noises up the chimney.
"What's all this, Mrs. Beale?" said Ukridge.
"He won't come down, sir, not while he thinks Bob's about. And how I'm
to cook dinner for five with him up the chimney I don't see, sir."
"Prod at him with a broom handle, Mrs. Beale," said Ukridge.
"Oh, don't hurt poor Edwin," said Mrs. Ukridge.
"I 'ave tried that, sir, but I can't reach him, and I'm only bin and
drove 'im further up. What must be," added Mrs. Beale philosophically,
"must be. He may come down of his own accord in the night. Bein'
'ungry."
"Then what we must do," said Ukridge in a jovial manner, which to me
at least seemed out of place, "is to have a regular, jolly picnic-
dinner, what? Whack up whatever we have in the larder, and eat that."
"A regular, jolly picnic-dinner," repeated the professor gloomily. I
could read what was passing in his mind,--remorse for having come at
all, and a faint hope that it might not be too late to back out of it.
"That will be splendid," said Phyllis.
"Er, I think, my dear sir," said her father, "it would be hardly fair
for us to give any further trouble to Mrs. Ukridge and yourself. If
you will allow me, therefore, I will----"
Ukridge became gushingly hospitable. He refused to think of allowing
his guests to go empty away. He would be able to whack up something,
he said. There was quite a good deal of the ham left. He was sure. He
appealed to me to endorse his view that there was a tin of sardines
and part of a cold fowl and plenty of bread and cheese.
"And after all," he said, speaking for the whole company in the
generous, comprehensive way enthusiasts have, "what more do we want in
weather like this? A nice, light, cold, dinner is ever so much better
for us than a lot of hot things."
We strolled out again into the garden, but somehow things seemed to
drag. Conversation was fitful, except on the part of Ukridge, who
continued to talk easily on all subjects, unconscious of the fact that
the party was depressed and at least one of his guests rapidly
becoming irritable. I watched the professor furtively as Ukridge
talked on, and that ominous phrase of Mr. Chase's concerning four-
point-seven guns kept coming into my mind. If Ukridge were to tread on
any of his pet corns, as he might at any minute, there would be an
explosion. The snatching of the dinner from his very mouth, as it
were, and the substitution of a bread-and-cheese and sardines menu had
brought him to the frame of mind when men turn and rend their nearest
and dearest.
The sight of the table, when at length we filed into the dining room,
sent a chill through me. It was a meal for the very young or the very
hungry. The uncompromising coldness and solidity of the viands was
enough to appall a man conscious that his digestion needed humouring.
A huge cheese faced us in almost a swashbuckling way. I do not know
how else to describe it. It wore a blatant, rakish, /nemo-me-impune-
lacessit/ air, and I noticed that the professor shivered slightly as
he saw it. Sardines, looking more oily and uninviting than anything I
had ever seen, appeared in their native tin beyond the loaf of bread.
There was a ham, in its third quarter, and a chicken which had
suffered heavily during a previous visit to the table. Finally, a
black bottle of whisky stood grimly beside Ukridge's plate. The
professor looked the sort of man who drank claret of a special year,
or nothing.
We got through the meal somehow, and did our best to delude ourselves
into the idea that it was all great fun; but it was a shallow
pretence. The professor was very silent by the time we had finished.
Ukridge had been terrible. The professor had forced himself to be
genial. He had tried to talk. He had told stories. And when he began
one--his stories would have been the better for a little more
briskness and condensation--Ukridge almost invariably interrupted him,
before he had got half way through, without a word of apology, and
started on some anecdote of his own. He furthermore disagreed with
nearly every opinion the professor expressed. It is true that he did
it all in such a perfectly friendly way, and was obviously so innocent
of any intention of giving offence, that another man--or the same man
at a better meal--might have overlooked the matter. But the professor,
robbed of his good dinner, was at the stage when he had to attack
somebody. Every moment I had been expecting the storm to burst.
It burst after dinner.
We were strolling in the garden, when some demon urged Ukridge,
apropos of the professor's mention of Dublin, to start upon the Irish
question. I had been expecting it momentarily, but my heart seemed to
stand still when it actually arrived.
Ukridge probably knew less about the Irish question than any male
adult in the kingdom, but he had boomed forth some very positive
opinions of his own on the subject before I could get near enough to
him to whisper a warning. When I did, I suppose I must have whispered
louder than I had intended, for the professor heard me, and my words
acted as the match to the powder.
"He's touchy about Ireland, is he?" he thundered. "Drop it, is it? And
why? Why, sir? I'm one of the best tempered men that ever came from
Dublin, let me tell you, and I will not stay here to be insulted by
the insinuation that I cannot discuss Ireland as calmly as any one in
this company or out of it. Touchy about Ireland, is it? Touchy--?"
"But, professor--"
"Take your hand off my arm, Mr. Garnet. I will not be treated like a
child. I am as competent to discuss the affairs of Ireland without
heat as any man, let me tell you."
"Father--"
"And let me tell you, Mr. Ukridge, that I consider your opinions
poisonous. Poisonous, sir. And you know nothing whatever about the
subject, sir. Every word you say betrays your profound ignorance. I
don't wish to see you or to speak to you again. Understand that, sir.
Our acquaintance began to-day, and it will cease to-day. Good-night to
you, sir. Come, Phyllis, me dear. Mrs. Ukridge, good-night."
CHAPTER IX
DIES IRAE
Why is it, I wonder, that stories of Retribution calling at the wrong
address strike us as funny instead of pathetic? I myself had been
amused by them many a time. In a book which I had read only a few days
before our cold-dinner party a shop-woman, annoyed with an omnibus
conductor, had thrown a superannuated orange at him. It had found its
billet not on him but on a perfectly inoffensive spectator. The
missile, said the writer, " 'it a young copper full in the hyeball." I
had enjoyed this when I read it, but now that Fate had arranged a
precisely similar situation, with myself in the role of the young
copper, the fun of the thing appealed to me not at all.
It was Ukridge who was to blame for the professor's regrettable
explosion and departure, and he ought by all laws of justice to have
suffered for it. As it was, I was the only person materially affected.
It did not matter to Ukridge. He did not care twopence one way or the
other. If the professor were friendly, he was willing to talk to him
by the hour on any subject, pleasant or unpleasant. If, on the other
hand, he wished to have nothing more to do with us, it did not worry
him. He was content to let him go. Ukridge was a self-sufficing
person.
But to me it was a serious matter. More than serious. If I have done
my work as historian with an adequate degree of skill, the reader
should have gathered by this time the state of my feelings.
"I did not love as others do:
None ever did that I've heard tell of.
My passion was a by-word through
The town she was, of course, the belle of."
At least it was--fortunately--not quite that; but it was certainly
genuine and most disturbing, and it grew with the days. Somebody with
a taste for juggling with figures might write a very readable page or
so of statistics in connection with the growth of love. In some cases
it is, I believe, slow. In my own I can only say that Jack's beanstalk
was a backward plant in comparison. It is true that we had not seen a
great deal of one another, and that, when we had met, our interview
had been brief and our conversation conventional; but it is the
intervals between the meeting that do the real damage. Absence--I do
not claim the thought as my own--makes the heart grow fonder. And now,
thanks to Ukridge's amazing idiocy, a barrier had been thrust between
us. Lord knows, the business of fishing for a girl's heart is
sufficiently difficult and delicate without the addition of needless
obstacles. To cut out the naval miscreant under equal conditions would
have been a task ample enough for my modest needs. It was terrible to
have to re-establish myself in the good graces of the professor before
I could so much as begin to dream of Phyllis. Ukridge gave me no balm.
"Well, after all," he said, when I pointed out to him quietly but
plainly my opinion of his tactlessness, "what does it matter? Old
Derrick isn't the only person in the world. If he doesn't want to know
us, laddie, we just jolly well pull ourselves together and stagger
along without him. It's quite possible to be happy without knowing old
Derrick. Millions of people are going about the world at this moment,
singing like larks out of pure light-heartedness, who don't even know
of his existence. And, as a matter of fact, old horse, we haven't time
to waste making friends and being the social pets. Too much to do on
the farm. Strict business is the watchword, my boy. We must be the
keen, tense men of affairs, or, before we know where we are, we shall
find ourselves right in the gumbo.
"I've noticed, Garny, old horse, that you haven't been the whale for
work lately that you might be. You must buckle to, laddie. There must
be no slackness. We are at a critical stage. On our work now depends
the success of the speculation. Look at those damned cocks. They're
always fighting. Heave a stone at them, laddie, while you're up.
What's the matter with you? You seem pipped. Can't get the novel off
your chest, or what? You take my tip and give your brain a rest.
Nothing like manual labour for clearing the brain. All the doctors say
so. Those coops ought to be painted to-day or to-morrow. Mind you, I
think old Derrick would be all right if one persevered--"
"--and didn't call him a fat little buffer and contradict everything
he said and spoil all his stories by breaking in with chestnuts of
your own in the middle," I interrupted with bitterness.
"My dear old son, he didn't mind being called a fat little buffer. You
keep harping on that. It's no discredit to a man to be a fat little
buffer. Some of the noblest men I have met have been fat little
buffers. What was the matter with old Derrick was a touch of liver. I
said to myself, when I saw him eating cheese, 'that fellow's going to
have a nasty shooting pain sooner or later.' I say, laddie, just heave
another rock or two at those cocks, will you. They'll slay each
other."
I had hoped, fearing the while that there was not much chance of such
a thing happening, that the professor might get over his feeling of
injury during the night and be as friendly as ever next day. But he
was evidently a man who had no objection whatever to letting the sun
go down upon his wrath, for when I met him on the following morning on
the beach, he cut me in the most uncompromising manner.
Phyllis was with him at the time, and also another girl, who was, I
supposed, from the strong likeness between them, her sister. She had
the same mass of soft brown hair. But to me she appeared almost
commonplace in comparison.
It is never pleasant to be cut dead, even when you have done something
to deserve it. It is like treading on nothing where one imagined a
stair to be. In the present instance the pang was mitigated to a
certain extent--not largely--by the fact that Phyllis looked at me.
She did not move her head, and I could not have declared positively
that she moved her eyes; but nevertheless she certainly looked at me.
It was something. She seemed to say that duty compelled her to follow
her father's lead, and that the act must not be taken as evidence of
any personal animus.
That, at least, was how I read off the message.
Two days later I met Mr. Chase in the village.
"Hullo, so you're back," I said.
"You've discovered my secret," he admitted; "will you have a cigar or
a cocoanut?"
There was a pause.
"Trouble I hear, while I was away," he said.
I nodded.
"The man I live with, Ukridge, did what you warned me against. Touched
on the Irish question."
"Home Rule?"
"He mentioned it among other things."
"And the professor went off?"
"Like a bomb."
"He would. So now you have parted brass rags. It's a pity."
I agreed. I am glad to say that I suppressed the desire to ask him to
use his influence, if any, with Mr. Derrick to effect a
reconciliation. I felt that I must play the game. To request one's
rival to give one assistance in the struggle, to the end that he may
be the more readily cut out, can hardly be considered cricket.
"I ought not to be speaking to you, you know," said Mr. Chase. "You're
under arrest."
"He's still----?" I stopped for a word.
"Very much so. I'll do what I can."
"It's very good of you."
"But the time is not yet ripe. He may be said at present to be
simmering down."
"I see. Thanks. Good-bye."
"So long."
And Mr. Chase walked on with long strides to the Cob.
The days passed slowly. I saw nothing more of Phyllis or her sister.
The professor I met once or twice on the links. I had taken earnestly
to golf in this time of stress. Golf is the game of disappointed
lovers. On the other hand, it does not follow that because a man is a
failure as a lover he will be any good at all on the links. My game
was distinctly poor at first. But a round or two put me back into my
proper form, which is fair.
The professor's demeanour at these accidental meetings on the links
was a faithful reproduction of his attitude on the beach. Only by a
studied imitation of the Absolute Stranger did he show that he had
observed my presence.
Once or twice, after dinner, when Ukridge was smoking one of his
special cigars while Mrs. Ukridge nursed Edwin (now moving in society
once more, and in his right mind), I lit my pipe and walked out across
the fields through the cool summer night till I came to the hedge that
shut off the Derrick's grounds. Not the hedge through which I had made
my first entrance, but another, lower, and nearer the house. Standing
there under the shade of a tree I could see the lighted windows of the
drawing-room. Generally there was music inside, and, the windows being
opened on account of the warmth of the night, I was able to make
myself a little more miserable by hearing Phyllis sing. It deepened
the feeling of banishment.
I shall never forget those furtive visits. The intense stillness of
the night, broken by an occasional rustling in the grass or the hedge;
the smell of the flowers in the garden beyond; the distant drone of
the sea.
"God makes sech nights, all white and still,
Fur'z you to look and listen."
Another day had generally begun before I moved from my hiding-place,
and started for home, surprised to find my limbs stiff and my clothes
bathed with dew.
CHAPTER X
I ENLIST THE SERVICES OF A MINION
It would be interesting to know to what extent the work of authors is
influenced by their private affairs. If life is flowing smoothly, are
the novels they write in that period of content coloured with
optimism? And if things are running crosswise, do they work off the
resultant gloom on their faithful public? If, for instance, Mr. W. W.
Jacobs had toothache, would he write like Hugh Walpole? If Maxim Gorky
were invited to lunch by Trotsky, to meet Lenin, would he sit down and
dash off a trifle in the vein of Stephen Leacock? Probably the eminent
have the power of detaching their writing self from their living,
work-a-day self; but, for my own part, the frame of mind in which I
now found myself had a disastrous effect on my novel that was to be. I
had designed it as a light comedy effort. Here and there a page or two
to steady the reader and show him what I could do in the way of pathos
if I cared to try; but in the main a thing of sunshine and laughter.
But now great slabs of gloom began to work themselves into the scheme
of it. A magnificent despondency became its keynote. It would not do.
I felt that I must make a resolute effort to shake off my depression.
More than ever the need of conciliating the professor was borne in
upon me. Day and night I spurred my brain to think of some suitable
means of engineering a reconciliation.
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