Rudyard Kipling's Tales of Horror and Fantasy (76 page)

Forthwith he created M. L. Sigden, a recluse of refined tastes who in
The Bun
demanded to know whether this Huckley-of-the-Hoopoe was the Hugly of his boyhood and whether, by any chance, the fell change of name had been wrought by collusion between a local magnate and the railway, in the mistaken interests of spurious refinement. ‘For I knew it and loved it with the maidens of my day –
eheu ab angulo! –
as Hugly,’ wrote M. L. Sigden from Oxford.

Though other papers scoffed,
The Bun
was gravely sympathetic. Several people wrote to deny that Huckley had been changed at birth. Only the Rector – no philosopher as he pointed out, but a lover of accuracy – had his doubts, which he laid publicly before Mr M. L. Sigden, who suggested, through
The Bun,
that the little place might have begun life in Anglo-Saxon days as ‘Hogslea’ or among the Normans as ‘Argile,’ on account of its much clay. The Rector had his own ideas too (he said it was mostly gravel), and M. L. Sigden had a fund of reminiscences. Oddly enough – which is seldom the case with free reading-matter – our subscribers rather relished the correspondence, and contemporaries quoted freely.

‘The secret of power,’ said Ollyett, ‘is not the big stick. It’s the liftable stick.’ (This means the ‘arresting’ quotation of six or seven lines.) ‘Did you see the
Spec.
had a middle on “Rural Tenacities” last week. That was all Huckley. I’m doing a “Mobiquity” on Huckley next week.’

Our ‘Mobiquities’ were Friday evening accounts of easy motor-bike-
cum
-side-car trips round London, illustrated (we could never get that machine to work properly) by smudgy maps. Ollyett wrote the stuff with a fervour and a delicacy which I always ascribed to the side-car. His account of Epping Forest, for instance, was simply young love with its soul at its lips. But his Huckley ‘Mobiquity’ would have sickened asoapboiler. It chemically combined loathsome familiarity, leering suggestion, slimy piety and rancid ‘social service’ in one fuming compost that fairly lifted me off my feet.

‘Yes,’ said he, after compliments. ‘It’s the most vital, arresting and dynamic bit of tump I’ve done up to date.
Non nobis gloria!
I met Sir Thomas Ingell in his own park. He talked to me again. He inspired most of it.’

‘Which? The “glutinous native drawl,” or “the neglected adenoids of the village children”?’ I demanded.

‘Oh, no! That’s only to bring in the panel doctor. It’s the last flight we—I’m proudest of.’

This dealt with ‘the crepuscular penumbra spreading her dim limbs over the boskage’; with jolly rabbits’; with a herd of ‘gravid polled Angus’; and with the ‘arresting, gipsylike face of their swart, scholarly owner – as well known at the Royal Agricultural Shows as that of our late King-Emperor.’

‘ “Swart” is good and so’s “gravid,” said I, but the panel doctor will be annoyed about the adenoids.’

‘Not half as much as Sir Thomas will about his face,’ said Ollyett. ‘And if you only knew what I’ve left out!’

He was right. The panel doctor spent his week-end (this is the advantage of Friday articles) in overwhelming us with a professional counterblast of no interest whatever to our subscribers. We told him so, and he, then and there, battered his way with it into the
Lancet
where they are keen on glands, and forgot us altogether. But Sir Thomas Ingell was of sterner stuff. He must have spent a happy week-end too. The letter which we received from him on Monday proved him to be a kinless loon of upright life, for no woman, however remotely interested in a man would have let it pass the home wastepaper-basket. He objected to our references to his own herd, to his own labours in his own village, which he said was a Model Village, and to our infernal insolence; but he objected most to our invoice of his features. We wrote him courteously to ask whether the letter was meant for publication. He, remembering, I presume, the Duke of Wellington, wrote back, ‘publish and be damned.’

‘Oh! This is too easy,’ Ollyett said as he began heading the letter.

‘Stop a minute,’ I said. ‘The game is getting a little beyond us. Tonight’s the Bat dinner.’ (I may have forgotten to tell you that our dinner with Bat Masquerier in the Red Amber Room of the Chop Suey had come to be a weekly affair.)

‘Hold it over till they’ve all seen it.’

‘Perhaps you’re right,’ he said. ‘You might waste it.’

At dinner, then, Sir Thomas’s letter was handed round. Bat seemed to be thinking of other matters, but Pallant was very interested.

‘I’ve got an idea,’ he said presently. ‘Could you put something into
The Bun
to-morrow about foot-and-mouth disease in that fellow’s herd?’

‘Oh, plague if you like,’ Ollyett replied. ‘They’re only five measly Shorthorns. I saw one lying down in the park. She’ll serve as a substratum of fact.’

‘Then, do that; and hold the letter over meanwhile. I think
I
come in here,’ said Pallant.

‘Why?’said I.

‘Because there’s something coming up in the House about foot-and-mouth, and because he wrote me a letter after that little affair when he fined you. ‘Took ten days to think it over. Here you are,’ said Pallant. ‘House of Commons paper, you see.’

We read

Dear Pallant–Although in the past our paths have not lain much together, I am sure you will agree with me that on the floor of the House all members are on a footing of equality. I make bold, therefore, to approach you in a matter which I think capable of a very different interpretation from that which perhaps was put upon it by your friends. Will you let them know that that was the case and that I was in no way swayed by animus in the exercise of my magisterial duties, which as you, as a brother magistrate, can imagine are frequently very distasteful to–Yours very sincerely,

   T.Ingell.

P.S. – I have seen to it that the motor vigilance to which your friends took exception has been considerably relaxed in my district.

‘What did you answer?’ said Ollyett, when all our opinions had been expressed.

‘I told him I couldn’t do anything in the matter. And I couldn’t – then. But you’ll remember to put in that foot-and-mouth paragraph. I want something to work upon.’

‘It seems to me
The Bun
has done all the work up to date,’ I suggested. ‘When does
The Cake
come in?’

‘
The Cake
,’said Woodhouse, and I remembered afterwards that he spoke like a Cabinet Minister on the eve of a Budget, ‘reserves to itself the fullest right to deal with situations as they arise.’

‘Ye-eh!’ Bat Masquerier shook himself out of his thoughts.

‘“Situations as they arise.” I ain’t idle either. But there’s no use fishing till the swim’s baited. You’ – he turned to Ollyett – ‘manufacture very good ground-bait… I always tell My people— What the deuce is that?’

There was a burst of song from another private dining-room across the landing. ‘It ees some ladies from the Trefoil,’the waiter began.

‘Oh, I know that. What are they singing, though?’

He rose and went out, to be greeted by shouts of applause from that merry company. Then there was silence, such as one hears in the form-room after a master’s entry. Then a voice that we loved began again: ‘Here we go gathering nuts in May – nuts in May – nuts in May!’

‘It’s only ’Dal – and some nuts,’ he explained when he returned. ‘She says she’s coming in to dessert.’ He sat down, humming the old tune to himself, and till Miss Vidal Benzaguen entered, he held us speechless with tales of the artistic temperament.

We obeyed Pallant to the extent of slipping into
The Bun
a wary paragraph about cows lying down and dripping at the mouth, which might be read either as an unkind libel or, in the hands of a capable lawyer, as a piece of faithful nature-study.

‘And besides,’ said Ollyett, ‘we allude to “gravid polled Angus.” I am advised that no action can lie in respect of virgin Shorthorns. Pallant wants us to come to the Housetonight. He’s got us places for the Strangers’ Gallery. I’m beginning to like Pallant.’

‘Masquerier seems to like you,’ I said.

‘Yes, but I’m afraid of him,’ Ollyett answered with perfect sincerity. ‘I am. He’s the Absolutely Amoral Soul. I’ve never met one yet.’

We went to the House together. It happened to be an Irish afternoon, and as soon as I had got the cries and the faces a little sorted out, I gathered there were grievances in the air, but how many of them was beyond me.

‘It’s all right,’ said Ollyett of the trained ear. ‘They’ve shut their ports against – oh yes – export of Irish cattle! Foot-and-mouth disease at Ballyhellion.
I
see Pallant’s idea!’

The House was certainly all mouth for the moment, but, as I could feel, quite in earnest. A Minister with a piece of typewritten paper seemed to be fending off volleys of insults. He reminded me somehow of a nervous huntsman breaking up a fox in the face of rabid hounds.

‘It’s question-time. They’re asking questions,’ said Ollyett. ‘Look! Pallant’s up.’

There was no mistaking it. His voice, which his enemies said was his one parliamentary asset, silenced the hubbub as toothache silences mere singing in the ears. He said:

‘Arising out of that, may I ask if any special consideration has recently been shown in regard to any suspected outbreak of this disease on
this
side of the Channel?’

He raised his hand; it held a noon edition of
The Bun.
We had thought it best to drop the paragraph out of the later ones. He would have continued, but something in a grey frock-coat roared and bounded on a bench opposite, and waved another
Bun.
It was Sir Thomas Ingell.

‘As the owner of the herd so dastardly implicated—’ His voice was drowned in shouts of ‘Order!’ – the Irish leading.

‘What’s wrong?’ I asked Ollyett. ‘He’s got his hat on his head, hasn’t he?’

‘Yes, but his wrath should have been put as a question.’

‘Arising out of that, Mr Speaker, Sirrr!’ Sir Thomas bellowed through a lull, ‘are you aware that – that all this is aconspiracy – part of a dastardly conspiracy to make Huckley ridiculous – to make
us
ridiculous? Part of a deep-laid plot to make
me
ridiculous, Mr Speaker, Sir!’

The man’s face showed almost black against his white whiskers, and he struck out swimmingly with his arms. His vehemence puzzled and held the House for an instant, and the Speaker took advantage of it to lift his pack from Ireland to a new scent. He addressed Sir Thomas Ingell in tones of measured rebuke, meant also, I imagine, for the whole House, which lowered its hackles at the word. Then Pallant, shocked and pained: ‘I can only express my profound surprise that in response to my simple question the honourable member should have thought fit to indulge in a personal attack. If I have in any way offended—’

Again the Speaker intervened, for it appeared that he regulated these matters.

He, too, expressed surprise, and Sir Thomas sat back in a hush of reprobation that seemed to have the chill of the centuries behind it. The Empire’s work was resumed.

‘Beautiful!’ said I, and I felt hot and cold up my back.

‘And now we’ll publish his letter,’ said Ollyett. We did – on the heels of his carefully reported outburst. We made no comment.

With that rare instinct for grasping the heart of a situation which is the mark of the Anglo-Saxon, all our contemporaries and, I should say, two-thirds of our correspondents demanded how such a person could be made more ridiculous than he had already proved himself to be. But beyond spelling his name ‘Injle,’ we alone refused to hit a man when he was down.

‘There’s no need,’ said Ollyett. ‘The whole press is on the huckle from end to end.’

Even Woodhouse was a little astonished at the ease with which it had come about, and said as much.

‘Rot!’ said Ollyett. ‘We haven’t really begun. Huckley isn’t news yet.’

‘What do you mean?’ said Woodhouse, who had grown to have great respect for his young but by no means distant connection.

‘Mean? By the grace of God, Master Ridley, I mean to have it so that when Huckley turns over in its sleep, Reuters and the Press Association jump out of bed to cable.’ Then he went off at score about certain restorations in Huckley Church which, he said – and he seemed to spend his every week-end there – had been perpetrated by the Rector’s predecessor, who had abolished a ‘leper-window’ or a ‘squinch-hole’ (whatever these may be) to institute a lavatory in the vestry. It did not strike me as stuff for which Reuters or the Press Association would lose much sleep, and I left him declaiming to Woodhouse about a fourteenth-century font which, he said, he had unearthed in the sexton’s tool-shed.

My methods were more on the lines of peaceful penetration. An odd copy, in
The Bun
’s rag-and-bone library, of Hone’s
Every-Day Book
had revealed to me the existence of a village dance founded, like all village dances, on Druidical mysteries connected with the Solar Solstice (which is always unchallengeable) and Midsummer Morning, which is dewy and refreshing to the London eye. For this I take no credit – Hone being a mine any one can work – but that I rechristened that dance, after I had revised it, ‘The Gubby’ is my title to immortal fame. It was still to be witnessed, I wrote, ‘In all its poignant purity at Huckley, that last home of significant mediaeval survivals’; and I fell so in love with my creation that I kept it back for days, enamelling and burnishing.

‘You’s better put it in,’ said Ollyett at last. ‘It’s time we asserted ourselves again. The other fellows are beginning to poach. You saw that thing in the
Pinnacle
about Sir Thomas’s Model Village? He must have got one of their chaps down to doit.’

‘Nothing like the wounds of a friend,’ I said. ‘That account of the non-alcoholic pub alone was—’

‘I liked the bit best about the white-tiled laundry and the Fallen Virgins who wash Sir Thomas’s dress shirts. Our side couldn’t come within a mile of that, you know. We haven’t the proper flair for sexual slobber.’

That’s what I’m always saying,’ I retorted. ‘Leave ’emalone. The other fellows are doing our work for us now. Besides I want to touch up my “Gubby Dance” a little more.’