MR. GARNET’S NARRATIVE HAS TO DO WITH A REUNION
The day was Thursday, the date July
the twenty-second. We had been chicken-farmers
for a whole week, and things were beginning to settle
down to a certain extent. The coops were finished.
They were not masterpieces, and I have seen chickens
pause before them in deep thought, as who should say,
“Now what?” but they were coops within
the meaning of the Act, and we induced hens to become
tenants.
The hardest work had been the fixing
of the wire-netting. This was the department
of the Hired Man and myself, Ukridge holding himself
proudly aloof. While Beale and I worked ourselves
to a fever in the sun, the senior partner of the firm
sat on a deck-chair in the shade, offering not unkindly
criticism and advice and from time to time abusing
his creditors, who were numerous. For we had
hardly been in residence a day before he began to
order in a vast supply of necessary and unnecessary
things, all on credit. Some he got from the village,
others from neighbouring towns. Axminster he
laid heavily under contribution. He even went
as far afield as Dorchester. He had a persuasive
way with him, and the tradesmen seemed to treat him
like a favourite son. The things began to pour
in from all sides, groceries, whisky, a
piano, a gramophone, pictures. Also cigars in
great profusion. He was not one of those men
who want but little here below.
As regards the financial side of these
transactions, his method was simple and masterly.
If a tradesman suggested that a small cheque on account
would not be taken amiss, as one or two sordid fellows
did, he became pathetic.
“Confound it, sir,” he
would say with tears in his voice, laying a hand on
the man’s shoulders in a wounded way, “it’s
a trifle hard, when a gentleman comes to settle in
your neighbourhood, that you should dun him for money
before he has got the preliminary expenses about the
house off his back.” This sounded well,
and suggested the disbursement of huge sums for rent.
The fact that the house had been lent him rent free
was kept with some care in the background. Having
weakened the man with pathos, he would strike a sterner
note. “A little more of this,” he
would go on, “and I’ll close my account.
Why, damme, in all my experience I’ve never
heard anything like it!” Upon which the man would
apologise, and go away, forgiven, with a large order
for more goods.
By these statesmanlike methods he
had certainly made the place very comfortable.
I suppose we all realised that the things would have
to be paid for some day, but the thought did not worry
us.
“Pay?” bellowed Ukridge
on the only occasion when I ventured to bring up the
unpleasant topic, “of course we shall pay.
Why not? I don’t like to see this faint-hearted
spirit in you, old horse. The money isn’t
coming in yet, I admit, but we must give it time.
Soon we shall be turning over hundreds a week, hundreds!
I’m in touch with all the big places, Whiteley’s,
Harrod’s, all the nibs. Here I am, I said
to them, with a large chicken farm with all the modern
improvements. You want eggs, old horses, I said:
I supply them. I will let you have so many hundred
eggs a week, I said; what will you give for them?
Well, I’ll admit their terms did not come up
to my expectations altogether, but we must not sneer
at small prices at first.
“When we get a connection, we
shall be able to name our terms. It stands to
reason, laddie. Have you ever seen a man, woman,
or child who wasn’t eating an egg or just going
to eat an egg or just coming away from eating an egg?
I tell you, the good old egg is the foundation of
daily life. Stop the first man you meet in the
street and ask him which he’d sooner lose, his
egg or his wife, and see what he says! We’re
on to a good thing, Garny, my boy. Pass the whisky!”
The upshot of it was that the firms
mentioned supplied us with a quantity of goods, agreeing
to receive phantom eggs in exchange. This satisfied
Ukridge. He had a faith in the laying power of
his hens which would have flattered them if they could
have known it. It might also have stimulated
their efforts in that direction, which up to date were
feeble.
It was now, as I have said, Thursday,
the twenty-second of July, a glorious,
sunny morning, of the kind which Providence sends
occasionally, simply in order to allow the honest smoker
to take his after-breakfast pipe under ideal conditions.
These are the pipes to which a man looks back in after
years with a feeling of wistful reverence, pipes smoked
in perfect tranquillity, mind and body alike at rest.
It is over pipes like these that we dream our dreams,
and fashion our masterpieces.
My pipe was behaving like the ideal
pipe; and, as I strolled spaciously about the lawn,
my novel was growing nobly. I had neglected my
literary work for the past week, owing to the insistent
claims of the fowls. I am not one of those men
whose minds work in placid independence of the conditions
of life. But I was making up for lost time now.
With each blue cloud that left my lips and hung in
the still air above me, striking scenes and freshets
of sparkling dialogue rushed through my brain.
Another uninterrupted half hour, and I have no doubt
that I should have completed the framework of a novel
which would have placed me in that select band of
authors who have no christian names. Another
half hour, and posterity would have known me as “Garnet.”
But it was not to be.
“Stop her! Catch her, Garny, old horse!”
I had wandered into the paddock at
the moment. I looked up. Coming towards
me at her best pace was a small hen. I recognised
her immediately. It was the disagreeable, sardonic-looking
bird which Ukridge, on the strength of an alleged
similarity of profile to his wife’s nearest
relative, had christened Aunt Elizabeth. A Bolshevist
hen, always at the bottom of any disturbance in the
fowl-run, a bird which ate its head off daily at our
expense and bit the hands which fed it by resolutely
declining to lay a single egg. Behind this fowl
ran Bob, doing, as usual, the thing that he ought
not to have done. Bob’s wrong-headedness
in the matter of our hens was a constant source of
inconvenience. From the first, he had seemed to
regard the laying-in of our stock purely in the nature
of a tribute to his sporting tastes. He had a
fixed idea that he was a hunting dog and that, recognising
this, we had very decently provided him with the material
for the chase.
Behind Bob came Ukridge. But
a glance was enough to tell me that he was a negligible
factor in the pursuit. He was not built for speed.
Already the pace had proved too much for him, and
he had appointed me his deputy, with full powers to
act.
“After her, Garny, old horse!
Valuable bird! Mustn’t be lost!”
When not in a catalepsy of literary
composition, I am essentially the man of action.
I laid aside my novel for future reference, and we
passed out of the paddock in the following order.
First, Aunt Elizabeth, as fresh as paint, going well.
Next, Bob, panting and obviously doubtful of his powers
of staying the distance. Lastly, myself, determined,
but wishing I were five years younger.
After the first field Bob, like the
dilettante and unstable dog he was, gave it up, and
sauntered off to scratch at a rabbit-hole with an
insufferable air of suggesting that that was what he
had come out for all the time. I continued to
pound along doggedly. I was grimly resolute.
I had caught Aunt Elizabeth’s eye as she passed
me, and the contempt in it had cut me to the quick.
This bird despised me. I am not a violent or
a quick-tempered man, but I have my self-respect.
I will not be sneered at by hens. All the abstract
desire for Fame which had filled my mind five minutes
before was concentrated now on the task of capturing
this supercilious bird.
We had been travelling down hill all
this time, but at this point we crossed a road and
the ground began to rise. I was in that painful
condition which occurs when one has lost one’s
first wind and has not yet got one’s second.
I was hotter than I had ever been in my life.
Whether Aunt Elizabeth, too, was beginning
to feel the effects of her run, or whether she did
it out of the pure effrontery of her warped and unpleasant
nature, I do not know; but she now slowed down to walk,
and even began to peck in a tentative manner at the
grass. Her behaviour infuriated me. I felt
that I was being treated as a cipher. I vowed
that this bird should realise yet, even if, as seemed
probable, I burst in the process, that it was no light
matter to be pursued by J. Garnet, author of “The
Manoeuvres of Arthur,” etc., a man of whose
work so capable a judge as the Peebles Advertiser
had said “Shows promise.”
A judicious increase of pace brought
me within a yard or two of my quarry. But Aunt
Elizabeth, apparently distrait, had the situation well
in hand. She darted from me with an amused chuckle,
and moved off rapidly again up the hill.
I followed, but there was that within
me that told me I had shot my bolt. The sun blazed
down, concentrating its rays on my back to the exclusion
of the surrounding scenery. It seemed to follow
me about like a limelight.
We had reached level ground.
Aunt Elizabeth had again slowed to a walk, and I was
capable of no better pace. Very gradually I closed
in. There was a high boxwood hedge in front of
us; and, just as I came close enough once more to
stake my all on a single grab, Aunt Elizabeth, with
another of her sardonic chuckles, dived in head-foremost
and struggled through in the mysterious way in which
birds do get through hedges. The sound of her
faint spinster-like snigger came to me as I stood panting,
and roused me like a bugle. The next moment I
too had plunged into the hedge.
I was in the middle of it, very hot,
tired, and dirty, when from the other side I heard
a sudden shout of “Mark over! Bird to the
right!” and the next moment I found myself emerging
with a black face and tottering knees on the gravel
path of a private garden. Beyond the path was
a croquet lawn, and on this lawn I perceived, as through
a glass darkly, three figures. The mist cleared
from my eyes, and I recognised two of them.
One was the middle-aged Irishman who
had travelled down with us in the train. The
other was his blue-eyed daughter.
The third member of the party was
a man, a stranger to me. By some miracle of adroitness
he had captured Aunt Elizabeth, and was holding her
in spite of her protests in a workmanlike manner behind
the wings.