“If only she could be with us now. And Father too!” sighed Uncle Otto.
They walked on steadily up the long, curiously empty drive between the lime trees, which made an arch above their heads, and came out on the wide sweep of gravel in front of the great, iron-studded door.
“They will be our friends and tell us stories?” said Ambrose, suddenly feeling rather wobbly and scared.
“Of course they will,” said Grandma. “Now come on, ring the bell.”
And bravely, Ambrose the Abominable took off his bedsock and, holding it carefully in his right hand, he pulled the big brass handle of the bell. They could hear it peal in the back of the huge house — a deep, long peal. There were footsteps, a creak as of a metal bar being pulled back — and then the great front door swung open and the yetis went inside.
The long journey was over. They were home.
11
The Hunter’s Club
While the yetis were walking up the long drive to Farley Towers, a meeting was being held inside the house, in the Gold drawing room, which faced the rose gardens and the terrace at the back.
The Gold drawing room looked much as it had looked in Lady Agatha’s day. The beautiful Chinese vases were still there, and the embroidered screen and the harpsichord. The sacred relic was there too: the other bedsock, the one that the Earl had brought back from Nanvi Dar and slept with under his pillow until he died.
But there were other things now, hung on the walls or resting on the furniture: things which would never have been allowed in the house when Lady Agatha was a girl. Heads they were, mostly. The stuffed heads of friendly hippopotamuses and gentle giraffes and thoughtful buffaloes, looking down on the room with sad and glassy eyes. There were skins, too — the skins of slaughtered tigers and zebras and leopards lying on top of the lovely, flower-patterned carpet. Sawn-off tusks and antlers were piled above the mantlepiece and in a glass case the bodies of poor, dead fishes hung stiffly.
The meeting was a big one. There were about thirty people sitting round a huge satinwood table, all of them men. And not one of them was a Farlingham.
The lady in the shop had not been lying when she said that Farley Towers still belonged to the Farlinghams. It did. But like many old families, the Farlinghams had become poor. They couldn’t afford any longer to keep the acres of roof mended, or pay gardeners to tend the grounds, or servants to care for the ninety-seven rooms. So they had decided to let the house to a school or a club or a hospital who would be able to look after it. And their agent, who looked after things for them, had let it to a club. A club that wanted to move from its headquarters in London to a place in the country because it needed more room.
The Hunter’s Club, it was called…
The members of the Hunter’s Club came from all over the world. There were oil sheiks from Iran, film stars from Hollywood, German industrialists, Spanish noblemen — anyone who thought that killing defenceless animals turned you into a “real” man. It cost twenty thousand pounds just to join the club and the funds were used to buy aeroplanes and motorboats and snowmobiles so that members could go and kill even the rarest animals in the most distant places without anyone being able to stop them.
In this way the Hunters had gunned down polar bears on the icebergs of Alaska, practically exterminated the Javan rhinoceroses and massacred the gentle, dreamy orang-utans of Borneo. Sometimes they went off on pig-sticking parties in Spain, running wild boars through with spears as they quietly snuffled under the chestnut trees, or they would fly to some African lake and mow down hundreds of gorgeous flamingoes from the comfort of their jeeps.
“Now then, gentlemen,” said the club president, a man called Colonel Bagwackerly, who had a boiled-looking face, pop eyes and a sticky moustache which clung like a slice of ginger pudding to his face. “As you know, we are here to discuss a very important matter.”
“A very important matter!” yelled the Hunters, banging their glasses on the table. They were already rather drunk.
“As you know,” Bagwackerly went on, “next week our great club is going to be one hundred years old.”
“One hundred years old!” repeated the Hunters, hiccuping and slapping each other on the back.
“And we are here to decide what kind of hunt we should have for our anniversary celebrations.”
“A big hunt! The biggest hunt ever!” cried the drunken Hunters.
“Quite so,” said Bagwackerly. “The only question is, what shall we hunt. And where?”
“How about polishing off the rest of the blue whales?” said a black-bearded Scotsman who called himself the MacDermot-Duff of Huist and Carra, and went around in a blood-red kilt and a sporran hung with a dozen dangling badger’s claws.
But the others shook their heads. Not enough sport, they said, and it was true. So many of these rare and marvellous animals had already been destroyed by greedy whale hunters that you could travel a thousand miles across the ice-blue waters of the Antarctic and not sight one.
“Vat if ve go schtick-pigging?” said a German member, Herr Blutenstein from Hamburg. But the others shook their heads again. For a big centenary hunt they wanted something bigger than pig-sticking; something with guns in it, and explosions, and blood.
One member suggested a kangaroo shoot in Australia, but so many of the kangaroos had already been turned into steaks that that wasn’t any good. Someone else suggested the wild camels in the Andes, but a revolution was going on in South America and the Hunters liked shooting things, not getting shot.
And then a small man with gold-rimmed spectacles and a pinched, pale nose got to his feet.
“I know!” he squeaked. “I know! I’ve got a great idea!”
“What is it, Prink?” said Colonel Bagwackerly in a weary voice.
They had let Mr Prink belong to the club because he was a very rich saucepan manufacturer and they needed him to buy helicopters and things like that. But everyone despised him: he was weedy and twittery and had a huge wife called Myrtle Prink of whom he was dreadfully afraid.
Now he tried to jump on his chair, fell off and squeaked: “Yetis! That’s what we should hunt! Abominable Snowmen! Fly out to the Himalayas and have a great big yeti hunt!”
There were groans from the other Hunters and the MacDermot-Duff of Huish and Carra swore a dreadful oath. “Don’t be an imbecile, Prink,” he said. “There aren’t any such things.”
“Yes, there are, there are!” shouted Mr Prink. “Look!”
And he took out a bundle of newspapers and threw them down on the table.
They were the papers that had been printed after Lucy’s footsteps had been found on Nanvi Dar and the headlines said things like: ABOMINABLE SNOWMAN STALKS AGAIN or MYSTERIOUS DENIZENS OF THE MOUNTAIN HEIGHTS or IT’S YES TO THE YETIS.
“Pull yourself together, Prink,” snarled Bagwackerly. “A pack of newspaper lies.”
“It isn’t, I’m sure it isn’t,” squealed Mr Prink. “We could stalk them in the snow and flush them from their lairs and shoot them with exploding bullets. We could have a yeti skin for the billiard room and yeti tusks in the armoury and—”
“Ein yeti schkalp für die library!” shouted Herr Blutenstein from Hamburg.
“That’s enough!” thundered Colonel Bagwackerly. “If I hear another word about yetis, Prink, I’ll have you thrown out of the club.” He broke off. “Drat it, that’s the doorbell, and I had to send the servants away. Can’t have them prying into our affairs. Go and see who it is, Prink, you might as well do something useful for once.”