Toad Triumphant

by William Horwood

  While behind him, gathering momentum under the Madame’s lead, Toad Hall was in uproar, with constables who had been ushers taking up their batons again. Those among them trained in the handling of hounds and bulldogs, using Toad’s cravat for scent, set off in pursuit of him who in breaching that most holy of promises to a lady had become a fugitive, and a criminal once more.

  Hobbling along behind them all, shaking his fist and with his eyes flashing with just anger, was the High Judge, who cried, “There will be no second chance!”

  All night long Toad cowered and shivered in the Wild Wood as the manhunt gradually closed in on him. What fearsome noises he heard in that dark dank place, what horrible eyes and faces within the roots of trees and what reaching crooked arms and claws within their ancient branches!

  “O despair, I am done for now!” wept Toad.

  Yet when the sun began to rise, Toad arose as well, and the dark fearsome shadows and noises of that place put fear in him no more. What he had seen of matrimony appeared to him to be more fearsome by far than incarceration in the Town Gaol, a trial, and a final and irrevocable sentence. In that was the greater liberty. He turned and made his way back to the Badger’s house and there, with his friends watching sadly he gave himself into the arms of the Law.

  To only one present had he any word to say and that was his young friend the Count.

  “As these honest men are my witness,” said Toad, pointing to the Senior Bishop, the Commissioner of Police and the High Judge, “I commend you to take a better road than I did. Be good, be kind to others, and think of yourself last of all!”

  Then, these worthy sentiments well spoken, Toad was taken into custody placed into a dark and shiny motorcar upon whose doors were painted the words “Town Constabulary”. Then he was taken back to a place he had hoped never to see more — the remotest, most inhospitable dungeon in the Town Castle.

  · XII ·

  Toad Triumphant

  Toad’s return to custody in the Town Castle was not much cheered by the familiar and doleful sight of the gaoler who had been in charge of him two years before.

  “Welcome back, sir, I hope you have had a good holiday outside,” he said.

  “You go up those stairs,” said one of the gaoler’s young colleagues, feeling that the dazed and miserable Toad might need direction to Reception, where he must have his head shaved and don prison garb.

  “It’s all right,” said Toad’s friendly gaoler; “this one’s a regular and knows the way.”

  “Will it go so hard with me?” asked Toad later, ensconced in his damp cell, with only a small, high barred window for light, and a few planks of wood for a bed.

  “O, they’ll hang you this time, sir, for certain, but in your case, since you’re a gentleman, I’m sure they’ll try to make a good swift job of it.”

  Toad wept.

  “There, there, sir, don’t be too unhappy. You’ve come in on a Sunday so there’s two slices of bread and dripping for tea instead of just the one.”

  “When will my trial come up?”

  “Tomorrow morning, first thing, Mr Toad. Yours is a special, I’m told, and they want to get it over and done with.”

  “Does it matter what I plead?”

  “Not from where you sit, no sir, but it’ll go hard with you if you plead guilty —”

  “But I am guilty.”

  “Well, so you may be; most of us are. But the lawyers like to have something to argue about so they can earn their fees by proving what they already know You’d be best to say —”

  “I am guilty,” said Toad obstinately “and that’s what I shall plead.”

  Toad’s trial proved to be complex and involved, since the crimes included insult and injury, in person and in mind, to representatives of Justice, Law and the Established Church.

  The fact that he did not deny his guilt regarding the main charge of breach of promise, despite a good deal of pressure from his lawyer to counter with all kinds of nonsense involving alibis, false identity, unbalanced minds and extenuating circumstances, did not seem to change the course of the trial very much.

  He sat once more in that uncomfortable chair wherein he had been tried on one hundred and sixteen charges two years previously in the same court room, and before the same judges, the High Judge himself once more presiding.

  Their wigs, their long faces, their convoluted language were bad enough, but the presence of the Commissioner of Police, representing the nation’s constables, and the Senior Bishop, in his role as Prelate in Judgment of the Ecclesiastical Court-in-Sitting, could not but impress on all those present, the accused in particular, that this was a Final Court from which the harshest Findings and the most brutal Punishments would (quite properly) be due.

  As generally expected, Toad was found guilty on each and every count, with sentencing to follow the next morning. It was early that morning, while he was waiting to be summoned for his final appearance in court, that he asked his gaoler for pen and paper, that he might write a letter.

  He sat and thought a good deal before he wrote down what he wanted, tears coursing down his face and making a mess of the ink. But he finished it at last and summoned his gaoler again.

  “Pray can you do me a small service? Please see that this missive is sent to my friend Mr Badger of the Wild Wood.”

  “It’ll have to be read by the Governor and censored as necessary” said the gaoler, “and the High Judge will have to read it too.”

  “I think there is nothing in it to which objection can be found,” said Toad. “Now please take it to them right away for I shall be called into court in less than an hour.”

  How right he was, for an hour later Toad was back in his cell, a condemned criminal. How long and full his life had been, yet how swiftly the High Judge had donned the black cap and pronounced sentence of death by hanging!

  “Life’s certainly upsetting, sir,” observed his morose gaoler, “and does take sudden turns. Here today and gone tomorrow, eh, Mr Toad?”

  The gaoler’s laugh was like the tolling of a bell at evensong.

  “Not tomorrow,” said Toad; “the day after that. Did you send that letter?”

  “Yes, Mr Toad, don’t you worry about that.”

  The letter arrived at the Badger’s house at the same time as news that a guilty verdict had been passed, and sentence of death by hanging pronounced upon the hapless Toad. For a time the letter was ignored, for though the sentence had been expected it was a shock when it was finally heard.

  “I am sad that my return to the River Bank has been accompanied by such grievous goings-on,” said Mr Brock, “and that my son’s first experience of the River Bank finds us all in mourning. If there is any comfort to be had at all in this, it is that my father can at least look forward to good years ahead with Ratty and Mole safe and well, for that might have been a different story, might it not?”

  They took a little comfort from this, but dead did the September sun seem, and muted the colours of autumn. Nor, when they read it, did Toad’s letter offer them much cheer.

  My dear friends,

  It has all gone against me and I shall not survive the week. I await final sentence this morning but none doubts the outcome. Therefore, lest I am in no state to write later, I do so now with two final requests.

  First, watch out for the Madame’s son, for he is good at heart, and always did well by me. He will have need of friends such as yourselves if he is to avoid that road I have taken.

  Secondly and even though you will call it empty vanity and false conceit, please me by inaugurating the statue of Roman triumph that the Madame completed in my image before my return, which was intended as a wedding gift. I prefer to be remembered so than as one tried by Society condemned to execution, and swung from the gallows.

  Alas, they have denied me my last wish here, and all I am allowed for a cigar is a clay pipe of shag, and for champagne a pint of Policeman’s Punch. In vain have I protested that shag and ale are not suited to Toad’s
style or taste. Therefore, when my statue is finally revealed, toast my health in my best champagne and smoke a Havana each in my memory I shall be very much obliged.

  Farewell from your old friend,

  Toad of Toad Hall

  “We must do Toad’s bidding,” said the Badger sombrely “and honour and remember his good spirit and intentions for others as readily as we shall seek to forget his ignominious end.”

  “But is there nothing we can do for him, nothing at all?” said the Rat, who now regretted most bitterly his resolve in making Toad return to Toad Hall, despite the protestations of all his friends that in the end Toad’s undoing was his own fault.

  “We could not protect our old friend from himself forever,” the Badger had said, “and I’m sure that Mole would say just the same. I have racked my brains for a way out but can find none. So too has Prendergast.”

  They turned to Toad’s trusty and able servant and saw his sadness.

  “I feel I have let my master down, gentlemen. And yet I take comfort in the discipline of my profession. You see, the Final Article of the Professional Butler’s Code, which as you know I had a hand in wording, suggests that when a master is in mortal difficulty the well-trained butler, may I say the professional butler, will always be able to find a solution to his woes. Such a butler must strive for perfection in the art and science of his craft, and never give up.

  “Therefore, gentlemen, sad though I am, I shall not give up till that moment when I hear, and on the best authority, of my master’s demise. Till then, as the Senior Bishop is inclined to say of matters in general, and spiritual despair in particular, there is always hope and I shall continue to seek a solution.”

  “Well then,” said the Badger, concluding this mournful discussion, “we shall cause Toad’s statue to be erected on the morning, and at the hour, of his demise, which is to say in two days’ time at midday. Till then do as Prendergast suggests, do not give up hope that a solution may be found.

  “But before I depart I think this may be the appropriate moment to read to you the brief note I have had from Madame d’Albert-Chapelle, who has been unfairly vilified in this affair. It is to her credit that once her initial distress at being jilted was over she did what she could to rescind the action for breach of promise. But as I warned, whilst the wheels of Justice are slow to start, they have proved impossible to stop.

  “She writes simply ‘Dear Monsieur Badger, I am very sad for my cousin Monsieur Toad, but I have not succeeded to get him liberty a second time. It is the guillotine for him. I shall always be unhappy for this, but remember with affection my stay with you at the River Bank. Commend me most especially to Mr Prendergast for his many kindnesses and give him this little drawing I made of him. With salutations, Madame d’Albert .”‘

  The Badger handed the little sketch to Prendergast, in which she had depicted him in the pose of pouring tea.

  “Thank you, sir, I shall treasure it always,” said he, putting it in his pocket. “Now, if I may —”

  Only then, for the first time, did Prendergast betray any emotion over his master’s fate, and there was no one there who did not understand why he swiftly hurried away back to the Hall and his own private thoughts, for surely it is much against the Butler’s Code to show one’s tears.

  Yet none there could have guessed that that was to be the last they saw of Prendergast, apart, that is, from the Otter who, up early the following morning, saw a very extraordinary sight emerging from the gates of Toad Hall. It was a horse at full gallop, and on its back was Prendergast, booted, behatted and rigged up for a long, hard journey and the direction in which he turned the horse, before the Otter had a chance to hail him, was the Town.

  The Otter felt it best to gather the Badger and the Rat, Nephew and Brock together to go to the Hall to investigate. All was in impeccable order, and various notices had been left in Prendergast’s hand giving instructions for the maintenance of the Hall and even suggesting two possible and most worthy successors to himself: namely Mr Edwards of Fulham Palace, or Mr Waller of the Blenheim Estate.

  “Ah,” sighed the Rat, “the strain was too much for him after all.”

  But when the Otter ventured below-stairs to the butler’s pantry he found the only evidence of the butler’s distress and haste. A half-drunk glass of sherry an ink well with its top unclosed and its pen uncleaned of the ink used in writing his final instruction. The gaslight still burning —”Most unlike Prendergast not to turn it off, he must have been very overwrought,” murmured the Otter.

  There seemed only one clear clue to the faithful butler’s purpose and desperate intent. For the Code he followed so carefully was also there upon his writing bureau. Between its pages a piece of paper had been placed which, on examination, proved to be that little sketch which the Madame had sent him via the Badger the day before.

  “But what possible effect can that have had upon so worthy a butler to push him into headlong flight?” said the Badger. Then he paused a moment, a look of surprise and dawning wonder upon his wise face, and he murmured, “Unless we do him a grave injustice —”

  “Look!” said the Otter in alarm. “See which page this drawing marked.”

  They saw that it was at Article Five of the Code. “Read it, Otter,” said the Badger in a voice that suggested he might be beginning to understand now what was afoot.

  “If the Master’s life is threatened, it shall be the duty of a professional butler to offer his life first which, if accepted, shall be repaid with an honorarium of one week’s holiday prior to said life’s cessation —”

  The Otter read no more, for the gist was all too plain.

  “What does he intend to do?” said the Otter, aghast.

  “Let us see what we can find in the rest of the Hall,” said the Badger, calmer and more hopeful for Toad now than he had been for many weeks.

  They explored the rooms, and it was Brock who found something else, this time in the conservatory. It was a champagne bucket, devoid of ice or a champagne bottle, but quite clearly ready to receive these special items of cheer and celebration, most carefully arranged upon a table adjacent to Toad’s favourite wicker chaise longue. With it was a box of Havanas, and the means to light them.

  Propped up against the champagne bucket was a sealed envelope addressed thus: For Mr Toad of Toad Hall. To be opened only by himself upon the occasion of his welcome return home.

  The hand was indubitably Prendergast’s own, and there was no further clue as to the contents of the envelope, or Prendergast’s intentions. Alone among them the Badger was calm, and by now almost cheerful.

  “Badger, will you kindly tell us what you think is going on, for I can see you think something!” said the Rat, speaking for them all.

  “I will only say” observed the Badger, after a moment’s reflection, “that I doubt very much, very much indeed, that there is a butler in all the land who combines common sense and resourcefulness with courage and self-sacrifice in so great and bold a way as the inestimable Prendergast. But if I am right about what he proposes to do to save his Master’s life, and thus fulfil the obligation of his Code, the matter is too delicate, too critical, too uncertain in its outcome, for it to be wise that I say more now.”

  The day the hour, the last minutes of the execution of Toad’s just and lawful sentence had come, and he sat now no longer in his cell. How homely that seemed compared to the cold clean-painted room they had brought him to now, whose only furniture was a hard wooden stool, on which he found himself sitting manacled and chained.

  Through a barred window he could see the gallows, and hanging from it a rope and noose. For company there was a clock upon the wall, whose minute hand stood at three minutes before noon, and his gaoler, who sought even at this late hour to cheer Toad up.

  “That’s a new rope they’ve got in for you, sir, which is thoughtful, is it not, for it guards against breakages.”

  “I suppose it does,” said Toad, upon whom an astonishing calm had descended.
He had stared into the void of matrimony and seen eternal horrors there, and despite all, the gallows seemed to him a swifter and more humane end.

  “Then again,” said his affable warder, “they’ve got in the Senior Bishop to say last prayers and rites, the Commissioner of Police, just to make sure you don’t escape, and the High Judge himself, to see his sentence is properly executed, if you’ll pardon the expression. It’s a high honour to have all three watching over you to the last, Mr Toad.”

  “I’m glad of it,” said Toad.

  The clock clicked a minute more, which made one minute less and two to go. At which signal the three important personages the gaoler had mentioned appeared upon the gallows’ stand in the courtyard outside, and the warder took Toad’s arm.

  “I think it’s time for a breath of fresh air, Mr Toad, if you follow my meaning. I hope you have found that I have been able to keep you cheerful to the last. You’ll find that Albert the Executioner goes about his business in a very affable kind of way. He’s more friendly than the last one they had, and very inclined to invite you round to meet the wife.”

  “I’m glad to hear it,” said Toad.

  Toad was led out into the open air and sunshine, up a few steps towards a large gentleman, a good deal larger than anybody else, who was wearing a black hood. The executioner approached Toad and placed the noose about his neck.

  “Didn’t know this was one of yours, Frederick,” said he to the gaoler, for they were old friends and had done this kind of work together more than once.

  Then, turning to Toad, he said, “That’s right, sir, stand just there, if you will, and I would be obliged if you did not move your feet. How’s the wife, Frederick?”