The Longer Bodies (2 page)

Although Godfrey Yeomond's affairs were in a flourishing condition, he suffered occasional twinges of conscience at the thought that, because of some bitter remarks made thirty years before, his children's chances of inheriting Great-aunt Puddequet's thousands were extremely slender. He spent considerable thought, therefore, on the remarks he proposed making to his family on the subject of their aged relative's visit, and decided on the Sentimental Appeal as being best suited to their youth and mentality.

At dinner on the Wednesday evening preceding Great-aunt Puddequet's arrival in their midst, he brought off a neat speech.

‘The First P.M. was in form tonight,' said Francis Yeomond later to his brother Malpas.

‘Yes, deuced good,' replied Malpas, critically examining his cigar. ‘I suppose he gets these at wholesale prices?' he added, lighting it cautiously.

‘I wonder how long she'll stay?' said Priscilla Yeomond. ‘Shall we have to push the bathchair?'

‘The P.M. says she can get about without it,' said Hilary, the youngest boy.

‘I shall arrange to get my leave cancelled if it proves too fierce,' said Malpas. ‘Old lady's a bit of a pussy.'

‘I'm taking ten boys to Switzerland on the eighteenth, thank God,' said Francis, the second son.

‘I shall write to old Shoesmith to ask me over to his place if I can't stick it here,' said Hilary.

‘You're a beastly selfish lot,' said Priscilla hotly. ‘Poor old lady!'

‘Poor old you, you mean,' said Hilary, with brotherly candour, ‘to be left holding the baby while we push off. Cheer up, duckie, and Frank will send you some picture postcards, won't you, brother?'

‘Understand,' said Priscilla, eyeing them steadily, ‘that, if you do slink off, I let her know why. And you know it's her cash the P.M.'s after. So there!'

‘But, my
dear
kid—' said three scandalized male voices in chorus.

Great-aunt Puddequet, however, proved a good deal less trying than they had expected. For one thing, as the sensitive nineteen-year-old Hilary expressed it, she looked all right when you took her out. She certainly had a pretty awful voice, they agreed, but fortunately considered London air bad for her throat. Parentally forewarned, the Yeomonds walked delicately. They endured even classical concerts without audible protest; they accompanied their great-aunt to the two or three London theatres which were showing pieces suitable to her age and experience, and on the second Saturday of her stay they escorted her to the White City ground to witness an international athletics match between Sweden and England. She had seen it advertised on the station platforms, had asked about it, and had demanded that she should be taken to see it.

‘Companion Caddick won't want to go,' she added.

The newly released Caddick, therefore, on the appointed day, with beating heart and secret ecstasy, stole away from the high, plain-fronted Georgian house to the nearest fare-stage for the buses. Armed with her spectacles and a packet of bulls'-eyes, she set off for the unknown. She was out to bag her first talkie. Her pale eyes glittered with a new light. She grasped the bulls'-eyes firmly.

‘But why can't they?' demanded old Mrs Puddequet.

Her grandnephew Hilary surveyed the White City ground resignedly from a front seat in the centre stand. Having lost all the field events to the United States athletes in June, the English hopes were as consistently losing them to the Swedish athletes in August. Amsterdam had told the same tale; South Africa had testified to its truth. England might point to her hurdlers, her sprinters, and her long-distance men with equanimity and even pride, but at the jumps, the vault, the shot, the discus, the javelin— where, oh, where was she?

‘Down among the dead men.' The military band on the left supplied a ready if somewhat tactless answer.

Hilary Yeomond sighed.

‘It's the public schools,' he said briefly.

‘But I thought, Grandnephew, that the public schools—' His great-aunt's tones were piercing. She had heard much in praise of the public schools.

‘Oh, rot!' Francis Yeomond—watching, through field-glasses, the super-human efforts of a yellow-thatched child of twenty or so to break the record for the ground over the pole vault—spoke peevishly.

‘It's nothing to do with the schools. Can't train
kids
to do the pole vault and put the weight.'

As junior languages master at one of the schools in question, and the chosen first string of his college (beaten) in the hundred yards at the University sports, he spoke as one having authority.

‘Of course you can train them.' Malpas Yeomond leaned back and clapped his hands perfunctorily as the yellow-haired Swede, amid vociferous applause, cleared the bar and fell gracefully to earth on the farther side of it.

‘It's the style does it,' he continued to the old lady. ‘Style and constant practice. You needn't let boys try for great height at first over the pole vault, and you needn't let them use a twelve-pound shot for the put until they've sufficient bodily development —but you can get correct style, and you can make them practise regularly.'

‘Piffle,' said Francis concisely.

Malpas shrugged his shoulders, consulted his programme, and made feverish hieroglyphics with a gold pencil as the megaphone boomed out the order of running in the last race.

‘We shall take this all right,' he announced confidently. ‘Better represented than the Swedes. Their Amsterdam winner isn't here, and that chap who always turns out in horn-rimmed glasses—what's the fellow's name?—I saw him in Paris last year—'

‘By Jove! There's a fellow with a trowel digging down to Australia!' said a boy; and from farther off a rough, good-humoured voice shouted loudly:

‘Hi! Give it up, boy! The Test's over!'

A burst of hearty laughter greeted the sally. The young Swede finished digging the holes for his starting position, and then looked up and waved his trowel happily at the broadly grinning crowd. It is doubtful whether he had caught the words or understood their application, but there was no mistaking the genuine good-fellowship of the waves of laughter.

‘On your marks!' The red-coated starter was raising the gun.

‘Get set!' The two runners raised the back knee from the track and leaned forward with the weight of their bodies resting on the front foot and the hands. Steadily they gazed at the surface of the track ahead of them.

The pistol cracked sharply, and they were off.

‘There you are, you see, Aunt.' Malpas Yeomond turned to the old lady as the first man home breasted the flimsy tape. ‘England wins. We can run all right, but, all the same, we've lost the match. Look, Aunt. They took the shot, the discus, and the two jumps. We haven't a chap on the ground today who can touch twenty-four feet for the long jump. Another two inches on our aggregate total would have given us the high jump, but we couldn't produce them. Then there's the pole vault—a perfect gift to them. And we lost the first sprint event through poor changing of the baton. Still, on actual pace we were sound. No, it's the field events that do it—and they always
will
do it until something pretty drastic is done about training boys early enough for them. As long as men with a twenty-one-foot long jump or a six-foot high jump or a forty-foot shot, and chaps doing eleven-six over the pole vault, are in the championship class in England, our case is hopeless. By the way, we'd better shift. We're blocking the traffic by remaining here.'

The drive home was short, and Great-aunt Puddequet spoke little. She sat in a corner of the big car, busy with sports programme and Malpas's gold pencil. The brothers discussed the events one by one. Dinner followed almost immediately upon their return to the house, and, to the general amazement, for she was in the habit of retiring to rest at about nine o'clock after a very light repast, the old lady, resplendent with diamonds, was pushed in her bathchair up to the dinner table. Clutched in her left hand was the programme of events she had bought on the sports ground. She laid it beside her plate, and said not a word throughout the meal except to squeal venomously at Timkins the butler for offering her wine.

When the meal was drawing to its conclusion, she put down the apple she had begun to peel, and looked meaningly round the table.

‘What did you tell me they call that plate thing they throw about the field, Grandnephew?' she demanded, looking at Hilary.

‘The discus, Aunt,' he returned, with a promptness which did credit to his intelligence. ‘But England didn't—'

‘I know they didn't. Do you know how to throw it, Grandnephew?'

‘Well,' replied Hilary cautiously, ‘I've seen it done, of course, and I know the theory of throwing it, but I've never actually had the thing in my hands.'

‘You could learn to do it.' Mrs Puddequet nodded her grey head decidedly, and disregarded her youngest nephew's dissenting voice.

‘And what about you, Grandnephew?' she continued, turning her yellowish eyes upon Malpas Yeomond.

‘High jump,' said Priscilla, from the other side of the table. ‘Used to win it at his private school. He's ever so good at it.'

‘Oh, rot, Priscilla,' said Malpas, grinning. ‘You're thinking of a chap called—er—called Smuggins.'

‘She is thinking of a chap called Yeomond, Grandnephew,' screamed old Mrs Puddequet furiously.

‘Answering to the name of Malpas,' said Francis solemnly. ‘He's a liar, Aunt. Take no notice of him. I saw him win it in about the year 1920. Did three-ten and a half at Tenby House School, with the matron and old Squarebags at the stands to see fair play. I always swear the matron shoved her end down two inches for him, but that's neither here nor there. He won. You know you did,' he concluded, kicking his elder brother vigorously.

‘And he did three feet—nearly four feet,' said Great-aunt Puddequet thoughtfully. Her eyes brightened. ‘Very promising. And at the White City next year he will do nearly eight feet—or perhaps a little more.'

‘Eh?' said Godfrey Yeomond, startled. ‘But, my dear Aunt, the world's record figures for the high jump are—'

‘Six-eight and a half, pater,' interpolated Hilary promptly. ‘H.M. Osborne of the United States holds the record, and it was clocked at Urbana in May 1924. Excuse me, Aunt. It's printed here, I believe.'

He turned to the end of his great-aunt's programme.

‘Here we are.'

‘Well,' screamed the old lady indomitably, ‘it's a very poor record, in my opinion!'

Her nephew and his sons gasped.

‘Blasphemy,' said Francis, under his breath, kicking Malpas with great joy.

‘Do you mean to tell me,' Great-aunt Puddequet went on in her raucous, cracked, high-pitched old voice, ‘that grown men cannot jump twice as high as a little boy of ten at a private school? Rubbish, Grandnephews! I don't know what the world's coming to nowadays!'

Malpas took up the cudgels.

‘It isn't quite a case of jumping twice as high, Aunt. You see—'

‘Take the force of gravity, for example,' broke in Francis, trying, in spite of his amusement, to do his bit towards clearing the great names of the world's champions from an undeserved slight.

‘And the law of what-do-you-call-it,' said Hilary helpfully.

‘And, of course, the binomial theorem of radio-electricity,' interpolated Priscilla, keeping both eyes fixed demurely on the tablecloth.

‘You may all be silent,' said Great-aunt Puddequet, with sudden decisiveness, ‘and listen to me. I am going home at the end of this week. Immediately I arrive I shall summon Queslake to draw up my will.' She glanced around the table in order to observe the effect of her words. The assembled company gazed back at her. At the sight of their facial expressions, Priscilla was compelled to check a desire to giggle.

‘To draw up my will,' repeated Great-aunt Puddequet, staring deliberately at each of the family in turn. ‘The bulk of the property and almost the whole of my private fortune I intend to leave to one of my grandnephews.'

She paused.

‘Which one?' asked Francis, unable to think of anything adequate, but feeling that in order to retain the high dramatic tension something ought to be said by someone other than Great-aunt Puddequet herself.

Great-aunt Puddequet regarded the interrupter malevolently.

‘The one who is first chosen to represent England in one of these field events you have all talked so much about,' she said. ‘I ought to mention that the three girls—'

‘Three?' enquired Hilary.

‘Certainly. Your sister Priscilla, Celia Brown-Jenkins, and Amaris Cowes.'

‘Oh, Celia and Amaris, yes,' said Malpas. ‘I seem to remember them vaguely. Celia was a pretty little kid, I believe, and Amaris rather a piece of frightfulness in looks. Glasses and things.'

‘Your creed appears simple, but is fundamentally sound, Grandnephew,' retorted Great-aunt Puddequet tartly. ‘Perhaps I may be allowed to continue without interruption. The three girls will each receive one hundred pounds, irrespective of their attainments'—she glanced contemptuously at the mildly pretty and faded face of Elizabeth Yeomond, whose marriage to Godfrey she had strongly opposed, and which opposition, vitriolic in expression, had called forth an (at the time) unforgivable retort from the bridegroom-elect—‘their manners'—she glanced at the averted face of Priscilla, who was laughing—‘or their conduct.' She shut her lips tightly together. They all knew that the reference to conduct had been called forth by the recollection of Amaris Cowes, who, at the age of twenty-two, had run from the Welwyn Garden City, where all is peace and joy and light, to sordid Bloomsbury. There, in defiance of the family minor prophets, including Great-aunt Puddequet herself, she continued to enjoy life among the artists in an altogether brazen, and, so far as her nearest and (presumably) dearest were concerned, an exceptionally irritating and successful manner.