Well, of course, it would be newts. I should have seen that right away. Since his formative years, Archibald Spotts-Binkle had been entranced by the slimy little wrigglers. At school, in his study, he kept a covey of them in a glass tank, and would spend hours considering their ways, often dangling flies on strings before their muzzles.
The rest of us boys, busy with our own interests, gave scant thought to Baldie’s odd fascination. If we had, I suppose it would only have been to give thanks that he hadn’t settled on some even less wholesome pursuit. And there lay our error. For as our boyhood interests gradually blossomed, if that’s the word I want, into more manly fields, Baldie’s traipsed off in the other direction.
He grew ever more engrossed in his study of newts, to the point where it became his life’s work. If he had ever mastered spelling, I am sure he would have written a book about the little blisters. As it was, he launched learned papers at some journal that concerned itself with newtdom; its editor, one Hudibras Gillattely, FRS, routinely sent back these epistles with stinging comments, igniting a long-simmering feud that may well have enlivened whatever gatherings drew newt fanciers together.
Through all this, Baldie stuck to his ancestral pile in the country, where he was mostly content, as the estate contained a pond that fairly seethed with newts. And there he would have remained had he not, while on a newt-seeking ramble along bosky bucolic lanes, happened upon one Marilyn Buffet, with whom he fell precipitously in love.
Theirs was a stormy courtship, on one moment, off the next, into which I was unwillingly drafted as a patcher and restorer. At one time, a left-handed twist of fate had seen me engaged to Marilyn myself, a situation that chilled the Gloster blood until it lay inert in the veins. In the end, thanks to a brilliant stroke by Greeves, who is rather deft in such matters, Baldie and Marilyn were delivered safely to the altar to become as one flesh.
The thought of the large-eyed yet somewhat droopy former Miss Buffet now raised a question in the penetrating Gloster mind. It was not like her to be hanging back in the shadows. She was a girl who liked to make her presence felt—not the sort to dominate a room but certainly able to pervade it. So it struck me as curious that the room in which I stood, and the bedroom in which I had awakened, betrayed no trace of the Marilyn Spotts-Binkle oeuvre: their respective wallpapers were not cloyed with flowers, the tablecloth was not embroidered with flocks of cheerful bluebirds, nor did every available surface bear a cluster of porcelain rabbits and mice colorfully attired in the habits of rustic folk of a bygone age.
For all the depth of my cogitations, no more than a moment had passed since Tove-Whippley had voiced his one-worded explanation as to what was wrong with Baldie. I now advanced a new and possibly more pertinent question. “Where’s Marilyn?”
He raised his eyebrows in a meaningful way. “Earth.”
A shiver passed through. This news was not good. In his salad days, before Marilyn had hove into view and taken him in tow, Baldie could have posed for a likeness of monomania. The realization that he was here on his own, and with newts in the picture, boded ill. I sat down again at the breakfast table and lit a meditative cigarette, blew out a peal of smoke, and said, “Out with it, Slithy. The full chronicle.”
I won’t reproduce his exact words, nor the several questions I had to put to elicit them. Conversation was never Slithy Tove-Whippley’s métier; he got by mostly on grunts and monosyllables. But the story that we together unfolded revealed that Baldie, after a lifetime of newt studies, had come to the melancholy conclusion that the field would henceforth offer him no new worlds to conquer. He had exhausted all that newts could offer him, and the realization caused him to fall into the aforementioned s of d.
But then he had read in the papers of the emergent craze for rocketing off to Mars and Venus. The former did not interest him, being a dry place; but the descriptions he read of the planet named for the goddess of love—its vast swamps, its rain-sodden jungles, its mosses and lichens—could not help but to ring the one bell in Baldie’s lightly furnished belfry: here must be newts; and not just any newts, but new newts waiting to be discovered, newts that languished unobserved, loitering about in their watery lairs until a bulbous Spotts-Binkle eye should fall upon them and make them known.
And then he’d heard that his arch foe Gillattely had upped stakes from Warwickshire to build himself a house in the middle of a Venusian swamp. There he was beavering away at winning the acclaim that warmed Archibald Spotts-Binkle’s dreams. He cast about for an early passage on a Venus-bound rocket, but was rebuffed at all the entrances; jaunts to the evening star were this year’s version of a season in Monte Carlo: all ships were booked solid. There was not a chance of an empty berth before next year.
But then a conversation overheard by chance in the Inertia Club opened the way before him. Slithy Tove-Whippley, marked for eccentricity in a club that included the likes of Barking Mondeley-Spriggs and Flinders Bunchup, had caught the Venus infection—not the newt variant, but the whiz-bang bug. He had already built a one-man rocket and flown it to Venus and back, and now he was seeking funds to build a more capacious model, which he would offer for charters.
Gripped by manic energy, Baldie began sending telegrams. In short order, he became the major shareholder of the Tove-Whippley Rocketry Company. He also sent several peremptory missives to Professor Gillattely, recommending that he cease all inquiries until a Spotts-Binkle was on the scene. These telegrams were returned as undeliverable.
Baldie redoubled his efforts to spur on Slithy Tove-Whippley, writing a blizzard of checks. And soon the silvery dart was ready to rise on its tail of fire. Baldie, equipped with nets, rubber Wellingtons, and a yellow sou’-wester, stepped aboard and blasted off in quest of newts.
“And did he find them?” I asked the rocket man.
“And how!” He chewed a piece of the local bacon. Apparently it was tough sledding, as it took him a while to clear the passages. “Pond. Middle of the estate. Newts abounding.” He raised both hands, crumbs dropping from fork and knife. “Big uns!”
Another conundrum. A Spotts-Binkle who had sought newts and found them in abundance ought to be dancing on moonbeams, not weeping over the kipper bones. There was little point in quizzing Slithy Tove-Whippley. His last peroration had probably temporarily exhausted a year’s supply of words. It would take hours for the cistern to replenish itself.
I had a momentary inclination to seek out Greeves and lay the mystery before him. Greeves comes equipped with a prodigious brain, whose powers he augments by frequently dining on fish. But a Gloster is also not without a neuron or two, and I resolved to pursue the matter myself. I went in search of Baldie.
It was a fair-sized house—it appeared to have been brought over in prefabricated sections—but experience told me that if the grounds contained a pond that contained newts, on its shores would be the first place to look for a newt fancier. I first had to find boots and an oilskin; my plus fours and tweed jacket, though eminently fashionable in Belgravia, would not have served. I sloshed my way from the rear of the house, down what would have been a sloping lawn had it not been ankle deep in moss. I found my old schoolmate on the banks of a dark pool whose surface was continually stippled by the ceaseless downpour.
The pond was not self-contained, but more of a widening in a sluggard of a river that separated the island on which stood the house from another bit of high ground where Slithy Tove-Whippley had parked the rocket. A stone bridge arched across a narrow stretch of the waterway to connect the two bits of terra firma.
While I was taking in the lay of the land, I also noticed that a short distance from the house, someone had stuck a short, white wooden stake in the ground. A little farther on was another, then two more, leading down to the water. Near the bank, a few more bits of wood were scattered about, as if someone had been marking out a playing field for a game but had grown tired of it and gone in to tea.