by Ruskin Bond
"You may have heard it stated that I am somewhat eccentric——"
"Oh, no," said Mrs. Oakhurst. "I cannot credit that!"
"I have known it said," declared Lord Bampton. "But I am only simple and direct. I shall be so now. I wish to be allowed to pay my addresses to your daughter. One moment, I beg! In London I admired her beauty and the eager interest she shared with me in music, but since observing in her whole family such a delightful sympathy with the animal kingdom, I own I am entirely conquered. May I reckon upon your assistance and that of Colonel Oakhurst in the achievement of my dearest wishes?"
And while Mrs. Oakhurst was expressing her sincere pleasure at the prospect, Gwendolen was arguing with her outraged father.
"By God, the man's mad!" said the colonel, as he rubbed his head with a rough towel. "Mad, mad as ten thousand hatters!"
"No, dad, he is only a little eccentric," urged his daughter.
"And mother says she thinks he has done it to try us."
"To find out if we really love animals," said Gwen eagerly.
"You go in and tell him I don't," piped the colonel furiously. "Tell him I loathe 'em, and that the only use I have for a pet is to boil it. If I thought—but no, it's impossible, impossible! By the—the—the—I'd murder him if I thought so! To try us! Oh, Lord, to try us!"
Gwen caught him by the arm.
"Do, do be patient, dearest. He's really such a dear. See how sweetly calm he is through it all."
The colonel grasped Gwen by her arm in his turn and spoke with deadly earnestness and great rapidity.
"Look here, I'm your poor old father, and I like to behave decently, but if you talk like that you'll—you'll drive me mad. D'ye want me to have apoplexy? Calm through it all! My Venetian mirror! My great grandfather's table and a goat! Tell him I won't stand it—I won't! Don't you see I can't? Calm, is he? Would he be calm if I visited his house with an unbroken jackass?"
" Oh, father, but this is only a sweet little goat," urged Gwen. "He is really a duck."
"No," said the colonel. "I may be mad, and Lord Bampton may be madder, but I'm not so mad as to think a goat is a duck. You ain't thinking' of marryin' him after this, Gwen?"
"Oh, yes, I am," said Gwen.
"Don't," said her father, "don't! I beg you not to. I knew a man who liked animals so that he used to take a bag of rats into his wife's bedroom, and with 'em three terriers, and said he'd divorce her because she didn't like it. A man that will bring a goat into an inoffensive stranger's house would put rattlesnakes into a baby's cradle. What's your mother doin'?"
"She's so calm, so sweet," said Gwen. "Do, do be patient, father dear, and it will all come right. Please come back now. If you don't, he'll think you didn't like him! Oh, even when the goat jumped over mother's head she never turned a hair! She—she was quite majestic!"
"Was she now?" asked the colonel, as he threw the towel into the corner. "She was majestic! And am I to be majestic too?"
"Yes," said Gwen; "do, do try!"
"Very well," said her father, in sudden gloom. "Come in and see me tryin'. But if this infernal nobleman tries it again with any other animal, a bull-caff or an orang-utan, I'll shoot it in the drawing-room. Yes, by all that's sacred, I'll blow its bleatin' head off! But come! I want to look at your mother being majestic. Majestic! Oh, Lord!"
They were just in time to see Mrs. Oakhurst trying to be majestic and making very little of it. Although she sustained the conversation with serious sweetness during the absence of her husband and daughter, it was, as she owned later, a very considerable strain on her not to turn round when the goat broke the three lower glass doors of an eighteenth-century bookcase while she discoursed to Lord Bampton about Gwen and the pictures in the room. It seemed that he had a true connoisseur's appreciation of Bonington and Cotman, and found the examples of these artists' work in the colonel's possession of the highest merit. But when Mrs. Oakhurst left her seat to point out a drawing attributed to Turner, the goat, having finished his work among the books, made three successive bucks and charged the mistress of the house from behind.
"Majestic!" said the colonel. "That's your word, Gwen!"
"Oh!" cried Mrs. Oakhurst. "Oh!"
"I trust most sincerely you were not hurt," said Lord Bampton, saving her from a fall.
"No, not in the least," said Mrs. Oakhurst, gasping, but recovering herself with great rapidity. "I don't suppose the dear creature meant any harm. It's only his play."
"That's it," said the colonel thickly. "By all that's holy, he has been playing with my bookcase! The whole room looks majestic."
"Does it?" asked Lord Bampton. "Does it? Ah, I see! You mean it looks like a ruin."
"That's it," said the colonel, throwing himself into a chair. "I've never seen a room like this since I was in an earthquake in Chile. It wasn't any common earthquake, I tell you."
"Earthquakes are very interesting phenomena," said Lord Bampton. "I too was in one once."
"But it didn't disturb you, I'm sure," said the colonel. "I'll bet the unwrecked part of this house you were as cool as a ton of cucumbers."
"I was not disturbed in the least," replied Lord Bampton. "I took notes and sketches."
"Have you a notebook about you now?" asked the owner of the scene of desolation.
It seemed that Lord Bampton had none, and any further suggestion on the part of the colonel as to a sketch was stayed by the goat assaulting the window.
"He seemed to wish to go into the garden," said the guest. "Perhaps it might be as well to let him out."
"It's a very fine garden," said the colonel, "and in perfect order, quite perfect. That's my beastly gardener's fault. I hate order myself. What I like is ruins—complete, majestic ruins! But my gardener doesn't. He's a very arbitrary gardener; there's no making him see reason. That goat will be a dead goat if you let him out."
"Do I gather you would rather the goat remained here?" said Lord Bampton.
"I—I don't know," said the colonel; "he seems cramped here. Would you like him to look at the rest of the house?"
"That is as you please, of course," said the guest. "Do you usually let goats go everywhere, or do you keep them to this particular room?"
"I don't keep 'em anywhere," said the colonel, choking. "They only come in as visitors—just as visitors."
"Yes, only as welcome visitors," said Mrs. Oakhurst, eyeing her husband anxiously
"Just as occasional visitors," said Gwendolen sweetly. "Do you allow them all over your house, Lord Bampton?"
"I beg your pardon," said Lord Bampton. "Do I allow goats all over my house? Oh, no, never, never! I don't in the least mind what they do elsewhere, but I draw the line there."
The colonel jumped to his feet.
"Father!" said his daughter.
"I can't be majestic any more," roared the colonel. "I must speak—I must! What's more, I will. Do you mean to say, Lord Bampton, that you never allow your goat to enter your house? Do you mean to tell us that you are so damnably unkind to a precious pet like a half-grown billy-goat as never to let him wreck a room full of valuable furniture, never to climb upon the mantelpiece, never to smash a few ancient mirrors, and, most of all, never to butt a visitor from behind?"
"Certainly not," said Lord Bampton warmly. "I am, I may say, notoriously fond of animals, but though it affords me no inconsiderable pleasure to see others even more attached and devoted to them, the very last thing I myself should allow is a goat, however well bred, to be in any of my own rooms. What goats, or other pet animals, do in other houses is, of course, a matter of perfect indifference to me."
"Stop!" said Colonel Oakhurst. "Stop before I break a blood-vessel. Perfect indifference! My hat!"
The colonel's agitation was now so obvious that it would have been ill-breeding on the part of the calmest nobleman in the kingdom not to notice it. Lord Bampton did notice it.
"Did I say anything particularly remarkable?" he asked, with perhaps a tinge of rebuke in his voice.
/> "Oh, no," said the colonel. "After all that's happened, what you said in the way of not carin' a Continental if I had a house over my head or not seemed like a long drink on a hot day. But, by this goat and the goats that ever reared over-end in a cabbage-garden, there's nothing more to be said. It's no go. It can't be done. I won't allow it. I'd rather die first."
"Than do what, dad?" asked Gwen.
The colonel gasped and again tugged at his collar.
"You—you know! You can't marry Lord Bampton—you can't! I won't have it. He's mad, mad, quite mad!"
Mrs. Oakhurst rose in haste. Gwen made a step towards her lover, who looked the picture of well-bred amazement. After his own apparently sound doubts of the colonel's entire sanity it was strange to discover that for some peculiar reason his own was doubted.
"Oh, father!" said Gwen.
"Oh, Tom!" said his wife.
"Don't Tom me," roared the colonel savagely. "I forbid it—all of it. I won't have it. Mad, mad as a hatter!"
Lord Bampton now perceived that he was in an awkward situation. He therefore sought to temporize with the colonel knowing that to contradict a maniac in the acute stage was, by those best acquainted with the insane, considered both useless and dangerous. It seemed possible to the guest that he had unwittingly shown disapproval of the goat being in the drawing-room. He hastened to remove this impression.
"Perhaps I was wrong in saying something which seemed to imply a lack of feeling for this delightful animal," he said very earnestly. "I assure you, Colonel Oakhurst, that when I said that what it did here was a matter of indifference to me, I by no means meant that I was not charmed and interested by it. I trust you will not think me inconsiderate to animals."
Colonel Oakhurst went the colour of an oak tree in autumn.
"Look here!" he said, and then stopped to catch his breath.
"Pray continue," said Lord Bampton.
"Take your damned goat out of my house," roared the colonel, "or by the Holy Poker I'll get a gun and shoot it!"
"Take whose goat?" asked Lord Bampton.
"Whose goat? Whose goat?" asked the colonel.
"Yes, whose?"
"Yours, yours!" said the colonel.
And Lord Bampton, for the first time losing the calm which became him so well, sat down in the nearest chair with a positive thump. The goat came up to him, and his lordship absolutely glared at it.
"My—my goat?"
"Yes! Take it away—take it away quick, before I explode," said the colonel. "Or else I'll do your cursed pet a mischief."
And Lord Bampton fairly collapsed.
"It's not my goat," he said feebly. "Oh, no, it's not mine! I never saw the awful animal before."
"Oh!" said Mrs. Oakhurst.
"Oh!" said Gwendolen, and once more the colonel did one of those peculiar little runs up and down the room which betokened a really disturbed state of mind.
"You never, never saw it before?" he asked at last in a curious choked whisper.
"Never, never!" said his lordship. "Why, naturally enough, I thought it was yours!"
It was the colonel's turn to sit down. He did so, and opened his mouth three times before he could speak.
"Oh, you thought it mine, did you?" he asked. "May I—may I ask if you thought I was twice as mad as a March hare?"
"The possibility never entered my head," said Lord Bampton earnestly. "I merely thought that your choice of a household pet was uncommon and the latitude you gave it surprising."
The colonel mopped his face.
"But—but it came in with you?" he urged. "I saw it myself."
"So did your butler," replied Lord Bampton; "but that doesn't make him my butler. If I had come in with a tiger after me, would that have made him my tiger? Of course I thought it was your goat."
"Then—then whose goat is it?" asked the colonel fiercely. "If Benson can't tell me, he'll be no one's butler in two shakes of a lamb's tail. Let me get at him!"
And then Gwen, who had been speechless, burst into laughter and interrupted her father at the door.
"Dad, didn't you tell poor Benson that Lord Bampton loved pets, and that if he brought one it was to come into this room?" she asked.
"You did, Tom," said Mrs. Oakhurst; "yes, you did!"
"So I did," said the colonel, "so I did! But I never, never, reckoned on a goat! Look at the fiend now! He's eating my old Persian rug. Let him, what's it matter?"
But it did matter, for the goat was disappointed with green worsted and eyed the whole party with malignancy.
"I apologize, Lord Bampton," said the colonel, "I apologize humbly and more than humbly I—I——"
"Don't mention it," said Lord Bampton. "I have a confession to make."
The colonel started.
"Look here, you ain't by any chance goin' to say it's your goat after all, are you? I tell you I couldn't, couldn't bear it!"
"No, Colonel Oakhurst," said Lord Bampton. "But you seem to know that I came here to ask permission to pay my addresses to Miss Oakhurst. I confess such a question would have been disingenuous since I have her permission to ask for her hand."
"My—my hat!" said the colonel. "You don't say so!"
"I do say so," replied Lord Bampton firmly.
"Speak, Tom, speak!" said Mrs. Oakhurst.
But the colonel couldn't speak. He looked round and, catching Gwen's beaming eye, saw the only thing to do. He took her hand and made a step towards Lord Bampton. But he didn't deliver the goods. The goat did that.
Ping Pong & Ruskin Bond
BY VICTOR BANERJEE*
You walked up a rickety old staircase, turned a shiny brass knob and passed through a creaky door into the horrors of the dentist's chamber. He was an ancient, asthmatic Parsee, forced to flee from the balmy shores of Bandra in Bombay, to the more moderate Doon valley. He gazed deep into the gaping mouth of the cherubic young boy who was screaming his lungs out to drown the drone of the dreadful drill that stood grimly beside him. "Great voice, terrible teeth!" the doctor wheezed.
Ruskin Bond was at an impressionable age, and would never forget the old wheezer's diagnostic proclamation about his singing voice. The years passed, and the cherub grew into a portly bundle of fun a great writer of children's stories and quite understandably, a frustrated singer.
As a kindergartner in Bishop Cotton School, in Simla, he was the most angelic of all the choir boys. Dressed in frilly gowns and leading the Easter Parades, he never understood why the choir mistress, tapping his soft derriere with a Malacca cane, had whispered. "Open your mouth wide, but do not, not ever, utter a sound!" Those words had tormented him for many years, and even bothered him today.
Ruskin grew up on Gilbert and Sullivan, and the Grand Operas. He puffed his hair meticulously, like Nelson Eddy, and when alone in his room, used boot polish to look like Paul Robeson. He fumbled through adolescence doting palely on Eartha Kitt and Elizabeth Taylor, dueting dolefully with Jeanette MacDonald in his shower, and lamenting the locks that hid Veronica Lake from him.
Today, as he leans out of his window on a summer's eve and gazes into the shimmering lights of the Doon valley five thousand feet below, he benignly recollects the old dentist's chamber of horrors and wonders what went wrong. Parsees are a respected bunch, he ponders, they never lie. Almost two generations of Indians had grown up reading his books, and it made not the slightest difference to him. Woefully he looked up at a sky bathed in neons from the planes and with tremulous cheeks, and a lump in his throat, began to sing.
A mellifluous voice bemoaned its outcaste state and the sycamores sighed to the strains of "Oh Rose Marie, I love you". Windows slammed shut. Children dived under quilts. Grandmothers smiled.
For years, this disembodied voice, to natives on the hillside, had been associated with the spirit of Captain Young; the Irish cavalier who founded Mussoorie almost two hundred years ago. On certain nights of the year, the Captain's ghost haunted Landour, and you heard his horse gallop across the slopes of Mallangar.
Not to be confused with any head-less horseman, Young sang. And that is how Ruskin has held onto his little secret, all these years. As a child in Kathiawar, he had hobnobbed with royalty, played Katisha in "The Mikado" and developed an intense passion for cricket, among other noble pursuits. Sometimes, squatting under the bellies of giant great danes in the royal kennels, Ruskin would snoop on the awkward dalliance of Monarchs with nubile concubines—between overs, naturally! Later, kicking sand in the face of a moon rising above the dunes, he would dream of one day carrying of his beloved like the Red Shadow, upon a spectacular Arabian stallion, into an oasis of ice-creams and mixed fruits jellies. Smelly stables and kennels were not quite his cup of ovaltine. Cricket, and England, were.
His teens he spent in a damp attic on Jersey Island, humming 'Shrimp boats are coming', reminiscing on his days in Dehra, and wrote the memorable book The Room on the Roof. During the day, he worked for a stodgy travel agent whose knowledge of geography was limited to Marbella. Ruskin endeavoured to send their clients to exotic destinations that he conjured up from the romances he read and the Broadway musicals he spent his wages on. Naturally, he got the sack. He took his revenge when, on his last day at work, he vicariously booked an entire group travelling to Spain, into the "Shangrila" in Tibet.
On his way back to London, across the fog-bound channel, he felt an enormous sense of relief. Leaning on the rails of the little ship that was ferrying him across, he could barely see the white cliffs of Dover when, overcome with nostalgia for the India he knew and missed, he burst into the Indian Love Call a la Nelson Eddy, "When I'm calling yeeoooou…." Two short, and one long hoot from the chugging steamer were his orchestral accompaniment, and the rapid tread of feet on the deck sounded like the drumming hooves of Canadian Mounties on the approach. As his voice floated above the choppy waters, he felt someone grab him by the collar, lift him off his feet, and throw him into a life-boat. His good ship lollipop, had sprung a leak.
