Toad Triumphant (7 page)

“But really Toad, I —”

“Not to mention the Water Rat, who in such matters is always so decisive and practical.”

“Toad, I —” essayed the poor Mole against the flood —no, the growing torrent — of Toad’s determination.

“But no matter,” declared Toad with every appearance of sincerity, and a rueful shrug of his shoulders. “I am sure you are a better judge of the strength of Badger’s friendship and respect for you than I am. Let us therefore forget that I have said anything about this rare chance upon which you have chosen to turn your back, and talk a little about this business you are hurrying off to attend to.”

“Well, it
is
quite important, you see,” began the Mole, considerably discomforted by Toad’s words, “and we have planned it over a long period, and after some ups and downs it is to commence tomorrow But if you would just tell me what it is you feel I have turned my back on then perhaps we can —”

O, how slippery was that slope upon which Toad’s “determination” had put the good Mole! How desperately the Mole felt himself struggling to keep a clear head and remember that the only thing that really mattered was escaping from Toad and getting to the Rat’s house.

“O, this will take no time at all, Mole. Come and you will be persuaded. See and you will be conquered. Partake and you shall take that step towards immortality which, just now, I greatly feared you were rather hasty in rejecting!”

With that, and no more to be gainsaid or resisted, Toad gripped tighter still upon the Mole’s shoulders as he guided him back over the bridge and thence through a small gate into his own grounds.

After a short distance much of the garden and the Hall itself could be seen, and the Mole was pleased to see that the grass that had been new-sown when he was last there had greened up a good deal since he had last seen it, and some of the plantings in the borders and the climbers about the pergola had begun to shoot and grow.

“You have certainly come a long way since that unfortunate fire two years ago,” said the Mole politely.

“Unfortunate? Do we call Fate unfortunate? Some may but Toad does not. Do we resist the tide of change? Most try, but Toad does not! Do we cling to the old? Everybody else may but Toad does not. No, he grasps the new with both hands!”

The Mole felt Toad’s grip upon his shoulder tighten, and was seriously beginning to wonder if Toad would get so carried away that either he would regard the Mole as part of the “old” and hurl him into the nearest ditch, or accept him as the “new” and cleave him to his bosom in even more unwelcome intimacy.

As he eagerly led the unwilling Mole back to the terrace where they had taken afternoon tea but weeks before the latter wondered with some foreboding how Toad might have resolved his dilemma of the empty plot, now that it was plain that he had not rid himself of his interest in immortality. The two were evidently connected.

“Sit!” commanded Toad, in some state of excitement. The Mole obediently sat, looking up at Toad expectantly.

“Sit and survey!” cried Toad, standing to one side so that the Mole had a full view of the garden yet-to-grow The Mole surveyed it for some time before saying (and never having been one to tell untruths or dissemble): “I can see very little; in fact I can see nothing at all.”

“Exactly!” cried Toad ecstatically “You see nothing because there
is
nothing. That’s the point, the whole point, about the landscape architect’s most excellent directive
‘Client to decide’.”

“Ah,” said the Mole.

“Nothing
yet!”
said Toad.

“Well, I really must be going,” said the Mole quickly struggling to rise from the chair into which Toad had put him, and hoping to make good his escape before the floodgates opened upon Toad’s newest scheme. As the Rat was inclined to say “The thing to do, Mole, if Toad is afflicted with one of his Ideas, is to get clear of him before the storm breaks, and let him huff and puff and dash around by himself till it wears itself out — or him out. Do not get involved if you can at all avoid it.”

But on this occasion it was too late. Toad put a firm hand on the Mole’s shoulder and held him where he was as he pointed to that troublesome vacant plot.

“The client has decided,” he said confidentially “to put
himself
there forever.”

The Mole gazed at the place in question, and at Toad, and he pictured again Toad standing on one leg in the setting sun, and a doubt occurred to him.

“You could not very well stand there forever without getting stiff and hungry, and very cold in winter,” he observed.

“Not
me,”
said Toad triumphantly “at least, not the mortal me. Mortals are mere flesh and bone and when we die we are gone.”

Light was beginning to dawn in the Mole’s mind, and with it came a sense of release. If this was to be the nature of Toad’s immortality then the River Bank was safe enough.

“You mean — ?” began the Mole, beginning to describe with his hands a general form and shape that he imagined might resemble Toad himself.

“Yes, Mole, I do!” mistaking the Mole’s dawning comprehension for a shared excitement for his scheme. “I mean to erect here the sculpted form of myself, which shall be cast in bronze and will last for many hundreds of years. That same statue, historic and memorable, whose tide shall be Mr Toad of Toad Hall, shall be replicated throughout the world in miniature copies that others, unable to see the real thing, may have their spirits uplifted and their hearts warmed. Like —”

“Like busts of Beethoven, perhaps, which some keep upon their pianoforte?” offered the Mole.

“I shall be very like Beethoven, yes,” agreed Toad.

“Or like those of Garibaldi,” the Mole added with some fervour, for he himself had such a bust and it certainly uplifted his spirits to look at it. The Italian revolutionary had been the Mole’s hero in his youth.

“Him, too, if you must,” conceded Toad, who knew nothing of Garibaldi.

He pointed to the surviving pedestal upon the terrace of an old statue long since relegated to the scrap heap.

“Used to be four of ‘em,” said Toad indifferently “but they fell into disrepair and that solitary pedestal is all that remains. They represented the four Virtues.”

“I thought there were
three
Virtues,” said the Mole, “Faith, Hope and Charity.”

“My father created a fourth for my benefit,” said Toad in a bored voice, “when I was born.”

The Mole noticed upon the pedestal an inscription in Latin which read, “HUMILITAS SUPER OMNIA”.

“What does it mean?” he asked.

“Nothing very much, I shouldn’t wonder,” said Toad. “I was never much of a scholar.”

“You say that this work commences tomorrow afternoon?” said the Mole, returning to the plans for the garden, now very much easier in his mind than he had been before. If there were nothing more to Toad’s scheme concerning immortality than spending some of his money in a vain and conceited effort to create a bust of himself, then he could see no great danger in it. Even Toad could not make such a harmless venture go awry though he himself could not share Toad’s belief that there would be a general demand for replicas of the original.

“This evening a continental artist of renown has agreed to come up to Toad Hall from the Town, and tomorrow that artist will conduct a preliminary sitting,” announced Toad, pausing in such a way that the Mole knew he was expected to ask a further question.

Since he saw no danger for the River Bank in this new venture, wastrel and foolish though it undoubtedly was, the Mole was only too happy to oblige his friend.

“You suggested earlier that we — that is Badger, Rat and myself— might help in some way? That we might be a part of this — ah — immortality.”

“You might, so you might,” said Toad grandly as if about to distribute largesse to workers on his estate. “I think it will be a good idea, and a gesture on my part in acknowledgement of acts of friendship in the past, if you and the others were to appear in some way in this work of art that I have commissioned.”

“Appear?” wondered the Mole.

“In a supportive way” said Toad hastily “Like those actors in a classic drama who come on and speak a word or two, or perhaps no words at all, but by their very presence help add to the audience’s esteem of he who plays the hero’s part.”

“I am sure we would find no objection to that,” said the kindly Mole, who saw right through Toad’s pomposity (though the Rat would certainly grumble a little about it) but felt certain that the others would be willing to play their part in the harmless charade.

“It is agreed then,” said Toad promptly “Report for duty tomorrow afternoon.”

“But Toad —” said the Mole, realizing too late his folly in agreeing to something that would interfere with the start of their expedition.

“You cannot, you must not let me down!” cried Toad immediately.

“Will it take long?”

“Minutes I should say” said Toad, who knew nothing of art and its making. “I have mentioned my idea to the personage who is coming and I have been told that in expert hands such a matter requires merely a few sketches. I, naturally will be needed for rather longer but with you and the others it is merely a matter of seeing you and — and so forth.”

“Well —” said the Mole feebly now seeing no way out of the dilemma his own weakness and good nature had led him into, but feeling sure he could find some way of persuading the others to humour Toad, “if it will only take a short while —”

There were a number of other questions the Mole felt he ought to ask, such as who this “personage” was, at the mention of whom Toad’s voice took on a strange tone of mischievous excitement which did not augur well. But the Mole desisted from further questions since Toad would take so long answering them that he would never get away —”

“That’s all, is it?” said the Rat irritably now that the Mole’s tale seemed to be finished. “We’re to be delayed to satisfy this latest whim of Toad’s?” He rose up and began to stow away the last few items for the expedition in the boats.

“I really do not think it too serious a matter,” said the Badger diplomatically “and as Mole has said, matters could have been much worse —”

“But that’s just it,” interrupted the Mole, “they
might
very well be worse! You see —”

“There’s more?” said the Rat very seriously turning from his task. “You have not told us all?”

“Well,” said the Mole very quietly lowering his gaze, “there is something else. You see I felt so relieved that matters had turned out as they had, so pleased, that I made a most foolish remark. A remark that suggested something to Toad that he had not thought of before.”

“You mean,” said the Badger, putting down his pipe and rising up with a look upon his face quite as serious as that already on the Rat’s, “you put a new idea in Toad’s silly head?”

“Yes,” said the Mole, very quietly indeed.

“What idea?” said the Rat with terrible calm.

“I do not know what came over me, but he pressed a glass or two upon me, as is his custom, and it must have gone to my head and before I left I found myself daring to suggest that — that —”

The Mole looked despairingly at the River and seemed to see in its great and sonorous flow not only the glorious eternities of life, but some of its unpleasantness and difficulty as well.

The others waited in terrible silence for him to finish. ,, — that there are other,
better,
kinds of immortality than mere busts of bronze.”

“Very unwise,” said the Rat.

“What kinds of immortality?” asked the Badger in a very serious way.

The Mole hesitated.

“Well?” said the Rat accusingly.

“You must try to understand, I meant it for the best —on that previous occasion in his garden some weeks ago I had felt quite moved and wistful at the thought that future generations might see his new garden full grown. I felt it a pity that we along the River Bank, with the exception of Otter, have no direct kith and kin. I suggested — and, O dear, it was foolish of me, I knew it the moment I said it — I said that perhaps true immortality can only reside in the offspring we have, and therefore perhaps — O dear, I meant no harm —”

“Goodness me, Mole,” said the normally cheerful Otter, voicing the worst fear that had arisen in the breast of each of them, “you were not so foolish, so
idiotic,
as to suggest to Toad that he should consider matrimony?”

There! The dread word was out and it rose and swelled and loomed above them like the darkest of storm clouds; and from the Mole’s guilty suggestion it was plain that that was exactly the idea he had sown.

“I was speaking hypothetically” said the Mole defensively.

“But he took it literally?” said the Badger.

“He did,” confessed the Mole finally. “He did, he did! O my!”

They stood in grim and gloomy silence before the Badger finally spoke:

“We must attend this artist’s visit, and conspire to puff up as much as we can Toad’s vanity and conceit in this sculptural enterprise. Perhaps the excitement of it all will distract Toad’s mind sufficiently for this malignant seed Mole has most unfortunately sown in the over-fertile soil of Toad’s mind to wither and die.