66 "He has probably had a greeted him. Clayton, of puncture," I suggested. course. I see you've got the Pyrenean androsace." We had agreed to give Uncle Bliss another five minutes, when I looked out of the window and saw him in the garden. How silently that Rolls-Royce had come up! Not a sound of the engine or wheels on the gravel, or the motor-horn we had been listening for. Where was the car, by the way? And what the devil was he doing poking about in the garden? Why didn't he come up to the door and ring? I was SO intrigued by his movements that I forgot to compare the concrete Uncle Bliss with my mental inventory. Was it? I did not know. The garden was Angela's affair. "Come in," I said, "and have some lunch. We had almost given you up. Had a punc ture? Uncle Bliss ignored the suggestion. "Your androsace is starved for soil," he said, " and it wants more shade. Did you say lunch was ready?" I explained to him that it was past two. "Your clocks are all wrong," he retorted pleasantly. "How ever, I am quite ready for lunch, rather peckish, in fact. I thought you were in the Sudan,' She flew to Sudan," he observed, as he wheeled his bicycle farther into the shade. Irene's quick eyes detected my astonishment. She flew to the window. "Mummy!" she cried, "quick! He's here. In the garden. Why doesn't he come in?" Angela carefully put aside her knitting and joined us at the window. Her movements never express surprise, but there was just an inflection of it in her voice. 'Well, I never ! she said. 66 "I ought to be," I said, 'but the Medical Board turned me down. I've got to go up and be vetted again in October." To this Uncle Bliss made no reply. He seemed to have lost the context. As I escorted him in across the lawn, I could see the chilUncle Bliss was botanising dren at the window-their eyes in the rock garden as if he had stretched to Oes, no doubtthe whole day in front of him fidgeting with excitement. instead of being nearly an hour Angela, of course, was not late. Irene was the first to spying. She would be knitting notice his bicycle leaning against quietly in the recesses of the the catalpa. drawing-room, as if Uncle Bliss' "You had better go out and invasions were a daily event, I thought of our hour of con- the character of Uncle Bliss. jecture. Here was the new One more instance of the variety of Homo sapiens. Quite secular triumph of matter over a distinct species. With the mind. children's gaze upon me I felt rather like a showman. Or a bear-leader, shall I say? Irene had got it in two guesses. Val, too, had reason to be satisfied with Uncle Bliss' roll. Our guest did not exactly lurch or shamble, but there was something in the movement of his shoulders, a kind of alternate rhythm, which one might, without exaggeration, describe as a roll. He was as completely unself-conscious as an animal, or, one might say, unconscious of others of his own species. Awkwardness and unself-consciousness. There again you have the bear. And he spoke with a bearlike gruffness, though not ungenially. I could see that the children were afraid he was going to kiss them, or hug them, which would have been more in character and, perhaps, not so unpleasant, as his hairiness was of the bristling variety. He shook hands with us all in turn, but did not seem to notice any of us much. Are you fond of games ? he said to Val. "Yes, that's right." And to Irene, "You like games, don't you? Yes, that's right. We shall see." And here he tapped his pocket. At this cryptic utterance and gesture the children's eyes became glued on Uncle Bliss' pockets, which were bulging. The character of those bulges was now more interesting than Uncle Bliss was so heavily encumbered that I was surprised he did not unload in the hall. But no. The dining-room door was open, displaying an array of agreeable objects on the sideboard, and he visibly gravitated towards it, carrying us with him. A quite unconscious manœuvre, I believe, but irresistible. Uncle Bliss had what you might call a dynamic way with him; I was going to say magnetic, but it was propulsion rather than attraction. He waved aside Angela's suggestion that he might like to wash his hands. before lunch. He was hungry, he explained; but it did not seem to enter his head that we might be hungry too, and that he had kept us waiting an hour. So he sat down, hot and hungry just as he was, talking incessantly, mostly about the androsace. Some one had sent it to Angela from Simla, but Uncle Bliss insisted that it was an exclusively Pyrenean variety. If it had been found at Simla, some one had planted it there. "You probably mixed the seeds," he said. After lunch I will dig it up for you, and show you how it ought to be planted." Angela smiled gratefully, though I knew that if Uncle Bliss, or any one else, laid a finger on her androsace, it could only be by an act of violence. 66 We thought you must have had a puncture," she said with studied irrelevance. "But you came by train, didn't you?" Yes, and bicycled from the station. I thought I saw you there. In fact, I saw two or three people who might have been you. Whatever social gifts Uncle Bliss might possess, tact was not one of them. Three of us were estranged by this remark to the point of committing assault and battery upon his person. Irene and Val blushed crimson. As if there were anybody in the world in the least like Mummy! "Women all wear the same clothes nowadays," growled the bear. "Makes them all look alike." Again I could have kicked him. I know no woman who dresses with such subtle distinction as Angela. She was wearing a light gossamer dress which hung straight from her shoulders, and revealed a new grace of outline whenever she moved. It was the most perfect garment for a hot June day, of a shade of green you only see in dragon-flies. It made you feel cool to look at her. If she had been a dragonfly, Uncle Bliss would have noticed her; or if she had been an aboriginal bushwoman, he could have told you what she was wearing. Anthropology was another of his hobbies. Uncle Bliss, Angela's antithesis in the category of Homo sapiens, looked far from cool. Drops of perspiration stood on his forehead and nose, and no doubt irrigated the scrubland that stretched upwards from his beard on each side of his face to meet his close-cropped hair. Nevertheless he rejected our iced claret cup. "No," he said, "thank you. I will have some whisky. My own, if you don't mind. I always make a point of bringing it with me." This was very polite for Uncle Bliss. He might have added, "You never know what you will get in other peoples' houses." Luckily we had the necessary siphon. Irene and Val had been unnaturally quiet, but they had forgotten Angela's injunction not to stare. I watched their eyes open wide as the whisky gurgled and bubbled from Uncle Bliss' flask into his glass. The extraction of this huge vessel from his pocket, by the way, removed one of the most promising bulges. There had been talk about gifts, and in the discussion I had overheard before lunch anticipation was heightened by Irene's definition of "rolling." The bicycle, I believe, was the first disappointment. And the whisky flask must have left a big hole in the prospective inventory. I was afraid the children were going to be disillusioned. However, Uncle Bliss played up in his own way before very long. We had been trying to get him to tell us about the Clapperhouse at Renton Parva, that "desirable country mansion" with its thousand-acre park. Old Slingsby, the M.F.H., used to live there, but he hunted no more, and the kennels were empty. Uncle Bliss was buying the estate as a repository for his collections. Or so we concluded. He collected everything, dead or alive, from giraffes to bibelots, but for many years he had had nowhere to put them. The museums and zoological gardens of England and France were packed with his "loans." We heard of him occasionally, and very rarely from him, in Papua, Nigeria, or Brazil, and gathered that this home-coming was a surrender to the tyranny of objects. im Naturally we wanted to hear his first impressions of the Clapperhouse, and what he intended to make of it. Would he keep okapi or racehorses in the stables? And how was he going to stock the lake Did he fish? Angela did not remember. We gave him more than one opening, but Uncle Bliss was a difficult person to deflect in conversation; possible, one might say, unless one were fortified by callosities equal to his own. It was Val in the end, insinuating strategist, who sapped a way into his defences. Two or three times I had seen his lips move, and caught a thin voice about as audible as a cicada in the roar of Niagara. "Uncle Bliss ! Uncle Bliss!" I saw Irene nudge him derisively, as much as to say, "You little idiot, what's the good!" Val, however, persisted, biding his time. There were occasional intervals .. of seconds, in which Uncle Bliss, his glass to his lips, recharging the battery, became vulnerable, so to speak, defenceless and inarticulate. In one of these Val's thin shaft went unerringly home. "Uncle Bliss, would you like to see our museum? " Uncle Bliss put down his glass, and surveyed his vis-à-vis attentively. "I should very much like to see your museum," he said. "What have you got in it?" Val, encouraged, launched on his inventory. "A caddis worm, a purple emperor, an envelope with forty-five postmarks on it, a lava green lizard, a flyingfish's fin, coral from Aden, a wooden shoe made by a lunatic at Colney Hatch the end of manoeuvres, but it was also the crown of adventure. It did not matter in the least that he had become a camp-follower in the rival army. A real live Zoo only a few miles away, and private too, belonging to a kind of relation! It was almost as good as having a Zoo of one's own. Of course, it was all still in the air, but the animals were coming, and the children were invited to come and see them whenever they liked. It was quite possible that they might arrive by the same train as the giraffe. Uncle Bliss beamed encour agement. Whether it was the discovery of kindred spirits, an audience really worth talking to, or merely the mellowing effects of the flask, I cannot say, but for the rest of the meal he was a different person. Conversation became triangular, between him and the children. And he did not talk down to them, but answered all their questions sensibly, as if they had been grown-up people. Was there going to be a lion? Certainly a lioness and cubs. And this opened up the question of accommodation. Where was he going to put the animals? Uncle Bliss invited suggestions. There were the stables. He was not going to have a horse on the estate. That would give him twenty loose-boxes. Then there was the coachhouse and the garage. No need of a motor when you can bicycle. And the kennels. He was not going to have any No. The turtles would be in the lake. The lake was to be artificially heated for crocodiles. The beavers would live at the other end-behind a partition, of course, and the penguins would live with the beavers and seals. They would have to build an ice-house for the King Penguin, or he would be too hot to bow. No snakes. At Irene's request it was decreed that the serpent should be banned in this Eden. So Uncle Bliss could be tame after all. He was feeding out of Irene's hand. Between them they stocked their zoological gardens. It was like the first chapter of Genesis come true. "Let there be ant-eaters and armadilloes. Let there be sloths and beavers." And if there were no ant-eaters or armadilloes, or sloths or beavers, they were convinced that there soon would be, which came to the same thing. Either way they tasted the joys of creation. I reminded Uncle Bliss that he could always build when he had used up all the stabling. |