Nothing Serious (17 page)

I am
not a weak man, but I confess that I shuddered.

“Timothy
Bobbin?”

“Timothy
by golly Bobbin. No less.”

I
shuddered again. This was worse than I had feared. And yet, when you examined
it, how inevitable it was. The poetry virus always seeks out the weak spot.
Rodney Spelvin was a devoted father. It had long been his practice to converse
with his offspring in baby talk, though hitherto always in prose. It was only
to be expected that when he found verse welling up in him, the object on which
he would decant it would be his unfortunate son.

“What
it comes to,” said William, “is that he is wantonly laying up a lifetime of
shame and misery for the wretched little moppet. In the years to come, when he
is playing in the National Amateur, the papers will print photographs of him
with captions underneath explaining that he is the Timothy Bobbin of the
well-known poems—”

“Rodney
says he expects soon to have sufficient material for a slim volume,” put in
Anastatia in a low voice.

“—and
he will be put clean off his stroke. Misery, desolation and despair,” said
William. “That is the programme, as I see it.”

“Are
these poems so very raw?”

“Read
these and judge for yourself. I swiped them off his desk.”

The
documents which he thrust upon me appeared to be in the nature of experimental
drafts, intended at a later stage to be developed more fully; what one might
perhaps describe as practice swings.

The
first ran:

Timothy Bobbin has a puppy,

A dear little puppy that goes Bow-wow….

Beneath
this were the words:

Woa! Wait a minute!

followed, as though the
writer had realized in time that this “uppy” rhyming scheme was going to
present difficulties, by some scattered notes:—

Safer to change to rabbit?

(Habit… Grab it… Stab it… Babbitt)

Rabbit looks tough, too. How about canary?

(Airy, dairy, fairy, hairy Mary, contrary, vary)

Note: Canaries go tweet-tweet.

(Beat, seat, feet, heat, meet, neat, repeat, sheet,
complete, discreet).

Yes, canary looks like goods.

Timothy Bobbin has a canary.

Gosh, this is pie.

Timothy Bobbin has a canary.

As regards its sex opinions vary.

If it just goes tweet-tweet,

We shall call it Pete,

But if it lays an egg, we shall switch to Mary.

(Query: Sex motif too strongly stressed)

That
was all about canaries. The next was on a different theme:

Timothy Bobbin has ten little toes.

He takes them out walking wherever he goes.

And if Timothy gets a cold in the head,

His ten little toes stay with him in bed.

William
saw me wince, and asked if that was the toes one. I said it was hurried on to
the third and last.

It ran:

Timothy

Bobbin

Goes

Hoppity

Hoppity

Hoppity

Hop.

With
this Rodney appeared to have been dissatisfied, for beneath it he had written
the word

Reminiscent?

as though he feared that
he might have been forestalled by some other poet, and there was a suggestion
in the margin that instead of going Hoppity-hoppity-hop his hero might go
Boppity-Boppity-bop. The alternative seemed to me equally melancholy, and it
was with a grave face that I handed the papers back to William.

“Bad,”
I said gravely. “Bad is right.”

“Has
this been going on long?”

“For
days the fountain pen has hardly been out of his hand.” I put the question
which had been uppermost in my mind from the first.

“Has it
affected his golf?”

“He
says he is going to give up golf.”

“What!
But the Rabbits Umbrella?”

“He
intends to scratch.”

There
seemed to be nothing more to be said. I left them. I wanted to be alone, to
give this sad affair my undivided attention. As I made for the door, I saw that
Anastatia had buried her face in her hands, while William, with brotherly
solicitude, stood scratching the top of her head with the number three iron, no
doubt in a well-meant effort to comfort and console.

For
several days I brooded tensely on the problem, but it was all too soon borne in
upon me that William had over-estimated the results-producing qualities of
white whiskers. I think I may say with all modesty that mine are as white as
the next man’s, but they got me nowhere. If I had been a clean-shaven juvenile
in the early twenties, I could not have made less progress towards a
satisfactory settlement.

It was
all very well, I felt rather bitterly at times, for William to tell me to “handle
it”, but what could I do? What can any man do when he is confronted by these
great natural forces? For years, it was evident, poetry had been banking up inside
Rodney Spelvin, accumulating like steam in a boiler on the safety valve of
which someone is sitting. And now that the explosion had come, its violence was
such as to defy all ordinary methods of treatment. Does one argue with an
erupting crater? Does one reason with a waterspout? When William in his airy
way told me to “handle it”, it was as if someone had said to the young man who
bore ‘mid snow and ice the banner with the strange device Excelsior— “Block
that avalanche.”

I could
see only one gleam of light in the whole murky affair. Rodney Spelvin had not
given up golf. Yielding to his wife’s prayers, he had entered for the
competition for the Rabbits Umbrella, and had shown good form in the early
rounds. Three of the local cripples had fallen victims to his prowess, leaving
him a popular semi-finalist. It might be, then, that golf would work a cure.

It was
as I was taking an afternoon nap a few days later that I was aroused by a sharp
prod in the ribs and saw William’s wife Jane standing beside me.

“Well?”
she was saying.

I
blinked, and sat up.

“Ah,
Jane,” I said.

“Sleeping
at a time like this,” she exclaimed, and I saw that she was regarding me
censoriously. If Jane Bates has a fault, it is that she does not readily make
allowances. “But perhaps you are just taking a well-earned rest after doping
out the scheme of a lifetime?”

I could
not deceive her.

“I am
sorry. No.”

“No
scheme?”

“None.”

Jane
Bates’s face, like that of her husband, had been much worked upon by an
open-air life, so she did not pale. But her nose twitched with sudden emotion,
and she looked as if she had foozled a short putt for hole and match in an
important contest. I saw her glance questioningly at my whiskers.

“Yes,”
I said, interpreting her look, “I know they are white, but I repeat: No scheme.
I have no more ideas than a rabbit; indeed not so many.”

“But
William said you would handle the thing.”

“It can’t
be handled.”

“It
must be. Anastatia is going into a decline. Have you seen Timothy lately?”

“I saw
him yesterday in the woods with his father. He was plucking a bluebell.”

“No, he
wasn’t.”

“He
certainly had the air of one who is plucking a bluebell.”

“Well,
he wasn’t. He was talking into it. He said it was a fairy telephone and he was
calling up the Fairy Queen to invite her to a party on his teddy bear’s
birthday. Rodney stood by, taking notes, and that evening wrote a poem about
it.”

“Does
Timothy often do that sort of thing?”

“All
the time. The child has become a ham. He never ceases putting on an act. He can’t
eat his breakfast cereal without looking out of the corner of his eye to see
how it’s going with the audience. And when he says his prayers at night his
eyes are ostensibly closed, but all the while he is peering through his fingers
and counting the house. And that’s not the worst of it. A wife and mother can
put up with having an infant ham in the home, constantly popping out at her and
being cute, provided that she is able to pay the household bills, but now
Rodney says he is going to give up writing thrillers and devote himself
entirely to poetry.”

“But
his contracts?”

“He
says he doesn’t give a darn for any contracts. He says he wants to get away
from it all and give his soul a chance. The way he talks about his soul and the
raw deal it has had all these years, you would think it had been doing a
stretch in Wormwood Scrubs. He says he is fed up with bloodstains and that the
mere thought of bodies in the library with daggers of Oriental design in their
backs make him sick. He broke the news to his agent on the telephone last
night, and I could hear the man’s screams as plainly as if he had been in the
next room.”

“But is
he going to stop eating?”

“Practically.
So is Anastatia. He says they can get along quite nicely on wholesome and
inexpensive vegetables. He thinks it will help his poetry. He says look at
Rabinadrath Tagore. Never wrapped himself around a T-bone steak in his life,
and look where he fetched up. All done on rice, he said, with an occasional
draft of cold water from the spring. I tell you my heart bleeds for Anastatia.
A lunatic husband and a son who talks into bluebells, and she’ll have to cope
with them on Brussels sprouts. She certainly drew the short straw when she
married that bard.”

She
paused in order to snort, and suddenly, without warning, as so often happens,
the solution came to me.

“Jane!”
I said, “I believe I see the way out.”

“You do?”

There
flashed into her face a look which I had only once seen there before, on the
occasion when the opponent who had fought her all the way to the twentieth hole
in the final of the Ladies’ Championship of the club was stung by a wasp while
making the crucial putt. She kissed me between the whiskers and was good enough
to say that she had known all along that I had it in me.

“When
do you expect your son Braid back?”

“Some
time to-morrow afternoon.”

“When
he arrives, send him to me. I will outline the position of affairs to him, and
I think we can be safe in assuming that he will immediately take over.”

“I don’t
understand.”

“You
know what Braid is like. He has no reticences”

I spoke
feelingly. Braid Bates was one of those frank, uninhibited children who are
not afraid to speak their minds, and there had been certain passages between us
in the not distant past in the course of which I had learned more about my
personal appearance from two minutes of his conversation than I could have done
from years of introspective study. At the time, I confess, I had been chagrined
and had tried fruitlessly to get at him with a niblick, but now I found myself
approving wholeheartedly of this trait in his character.

“Reflect.
What will Braid’s reaction be to the news that these poems are being written
about Timothy? He will be revolted, and will say so, not mincing his words.
Briefly, he will kid the pants off the young Spelvin, and it should not be long
before the latter, instead of gloating obscenely, will be writhing in an agony
of shame at the mention of Timothy Bobbin and begging Rodney to lay off. And
surely even a poet cannot be deaf to the pleadings of the child he loves. Leave
it to Braid. He will put everything right.”

Jane
had grasped it now, and her face was aglow with the light of mother love.”

“Why,
of course!” she cried, clasping her hands in a sort of ecstasy. “I ought to
have thought of it myself. People may say what they like about my sweet Braid,
but they can’t deny that he is the rudest child this side of the Atlantic
Ocean. I’ll send him to you the moment he clocks in.”

Braid
Bates at that time was a young plug-ugly of some nine summers, in appearance a
miniature edition of William and in soul and temperament a combination of Dead
End Kid and army mule; a freckled hard-boiled character with a sardonic eye and
a mouth which, when not occupied in eating, had a cynical twist to it. He spoke
little as a general thing, but when he did speak seldom failed to find a chink
in the armour. The impact of such a personality on little Timothy must, I felt,
be tremendous, and I was confident that we could not have placed the child in
better hands.