Englishmen? Not that I mind what Frenchmen say of us; their observations have ill-accorded with mine own; or of my reading come to that. 'Tis Merrie England all the time to me and what have the French to equal Sterne or Smollett or yet a Surtees? I've still to see a Frenchman Jorrocks ride to hounds. With them it's wit and badinage that's aye the joke. With us 'tis ever action and that war between our words and what we be which they across the Channel have named hypocrisy. And what we be is all mixed up with alien blood and refugees from tyranny like a bag pudding boiled within this pot we call the British Isles. 'Twas ever thus; 'twill ever be; a ragamuffin race of scoundrels born of pirates on the run. What say you to that, Magrew, you who have some acquaintanceship with Hume?'
But Dr Magrew, like Mr Bullstrode, had nothing to say. He was silent before this effigy of the past which uttered words in parody of its own complex self. He gaped and as he gaped the old man's voice rose louder still. It was filled with fury now and Lockhart, wrestling with the remote control, found nothing would abate his voice.
'It was some damned scoundrel versifying American,' bawled Mr Flawse, 'would have it that he'd go with a whimper not a bang. 'Twere better for the creature had he been with Whymper on the Matterhorn and learnt the meaning of a fall. Well, I'll not do the same. Damn whimpering, sir, and being the world's whining beggar, cap in hand. I've not a forelock left to touch and wouldna raise a finger to it had I one, to wheedle pennies from a foreign swine be he an Arab Sheik or the Emperor of Japan. I'm true-born English to the core and so I will remain. So keep your whimpering for womenfolk and let me have my bang.'
And as if in answer to this request there was a dull explosion in his innards and smoke poured out of his ears. Mr Bullstrode and Dr Magrew looked on appalled while Lockhart, trying the switches, shouted to Mr Dodd.
'The fire extinguisher,' he yelled, "for God's sake get the fire extinguisher!'
But it was no good. Mr Flawse was living up to his promise not to whimper. Flailing round him with his arms and shouting incomprehensible imprecations from his clapper mouth he streaked in his wheelchair across the banqueting hall, gathered a rug over his feet on the way, bounced off an armoured figure and finally, with that practicality he had always admired in his ancestors, shot into the open hearth and burst into flames. By the time Mr Dodd arrived with fire extinguisher he was beyond extinction and had flared up the chimney in a shower of sparks and flames.
'The man was born unto trouble as the sparks fly upward. Amen,' said Mr Dodd.
And so in the great hearth old Mr Flawse, the last of his line, finally fizzled out before the eyes of his two closest friends, Jessica, Mr Dodd, and the man he had always called the bastard.
'Almost a Viking's funeral,' said Dr Magrew as the charred remains flaked to ashes and the last transistor melted. It had been made in Japan, he noted, which tended to contradict the old man's final boast that he was English to the core. He was about to point this interesting anatomical and philosophical observation out to Mr Bullstrode when he was interrupted by a cry from behind him. Lockhart was standing on the oak table among the guttering candles and tears were running down his cheeks. 'The De'il has pity in him yet,' thought the doctor but Mr Dodd, recognizing the symptoms, picked up his pipes and squeezed the bag under his arm as Lockhart began his dirge. 'The last of them all is gan fra' the Hall
And the Flawse is fled fra' the fell But those that are left can aye recall
The tales he used to tell.
Twa deaths he died, twa lives he led,
Twa men he might have been; The ane spake words he had but read
The ither he didna mean.
And so he struggled his whole life through
And niver in strife he ceased. And he allus sought what was good and true
Though hissel' to be half a beast.
'Twas all the truth he iver knew
Since Science and God had fled, And you couldna shake his firm held view
That the best of men are dead.
But their words remain to ease our pain
And he'd have us now rejoice That though he's gan we can hear again
The sound of his living voice.'
While Mr Dodd squeezed on with his tune, Lockhart jumped down from the table and left the pele tower. Behind him Mr Bullstrode and Dr Magrew looked at one another in wonderment and for once even Jessica, startled into womanly concern by Lockhart's tears, lost her sentimental streak and stood dry-eyed. She was about to follow Lockhart out when Mr Dodd stopped her.
'Let him be by hissel', hinnie,' he said. 'He gan to dree his weird awhile.'
Mr Dodd was only partly right. Lockhart was not dreeing but what came next was certainly weird. As the sun rose over Tombstone Law a thousand loudspeakers planted across the fell boomed forth again. This time the sound was not that of shell and shot but the gigantic voice of Edwin Tyndale Flawse. He was singing the 'The Ballad of Prick 'Em Dry'.
Chapter twenty-two
As the final echoes of that enormous voice died away and the deafened birds in the pinewoods round the reservoir fluttered back to their perches and tried to resume their morning chorus, Lockhart and Jessica stood on the roof of the peel tower and looked over the battlements at the land that was truly theirs. Lockhart's tears were gone. They had never been entirely for the conflagration of his grandfather but more for the loss of that terrible innocence which had been the old man's intellectual legacy to him. And, like some incubus, that innocence had lain heavily upon him denying him the right to guilt and the true humanity which comes from guilt and innocence. Lockhart had stated it all unconsciously in his lament but now he felt free to be his divided self, a man of lusts as well as loves, of ingenuity mingled with compassion, of fear as well as mindless bravery, in short a man like other men. All this his grandfather's obsession with heroes and hero-worship had denied him but, in the flames that had consumed Mr Flawse, Lockhart had been born anew, his own man, never mind his ancestry or who and what his father might have been and done,
And so while Mr Bullstrode and Dr Magrew drove off down the road to Hexham and Mr Dodd with brush and dust-pan swept the ashes of his late master from the grate and, separating those foreign parts which had been the components of old Mr Flawse's posthumous animation, deposited the rest in the cucumber frame, Lockhart and Jessica stood together and were content to be themselves.
The same could hardly be said for Mr Mirkin or the Excise men now back in Hexham. Mr Mirkin in particular was not himself and no longer beside himself. He had no self to be beside. The Senior Collector of Taxes (Supertax Division; sub-department. Evasion of) was back in hospital outwardly unscathed but suffering internally the simultaneous after-effects of extremely low-frequency waves, His condition baffled the doctors who could make neither head nor tail of his symptoms. At one end he fluttered; at the other end he wowed. The combination was one they had never previously encountered and it was only with the arrival of Dr Magrew, who suggested plastering his plastered legs together to stop them oscillating, that Mr Mirkin could be kept in bed. Even so he wowed, his most insistent wow being to have bis Schedule D, a demand that led to some confusion with the Vitamin. In the end he was gagged and his head encased in lead-filled icebags to stop it vibrating.