Toad Triumphant by William Horwood Read Free Book Online Page B

in some state of excitement. The Mole obediently sat, looking up at Toad expectantly.
    “Sit and survey!” cried Toad, standing to one side so that the Mole had a full view of the garden yet-to-grow The Mole surveyed it for some time before saying (and never having been one to tell untruths or dissemble): “I can see very little; in fact I can see nothing at all.”
    “Exactly!” cried Toad ecstatically “You see nothing because there is nothing. That’s the point, the whole point, about the landscape architect’s most excellent directive ‘Client to decide’.”
    “Ah,” said the Mole.
    “Nothing yet!” said Toad.
    “Well, I really must be going,” said the Mole quickly struggling to rise from the chair into which Toad had put him, and hoping to make good his escape before the floodgates opened upon Toad’s newest scheme. As the Rat was inclined to say “The thing to do, Mole, if Toad is afflicted with one of his Ideas, is to get clear of him before the storm breaks, and let him huff and puff and dash around by himself till it wears itself out — or him out. Do not get involved if you can at all avoid it.”
    But on this occasion it was too late. Toad put a firm hand on the Mole’s shoulder and held him where he was as he pointed to that troublesome vacant plot.
    “The client has decided,” he said confidentially “to put himself there forever.”
    The Mole gazed at the place in question, and at Toad, and he pictured again Toad standing on one leg in the setting sun, and a doubt occurred to him.
    “You could not very well stand there forever without getting stiff and hungry, and very cold in winter,” he observed.
    “Not me,” said Toad triumphantly “at least, not the mortal me. Mortals are mere flesh and bone and when we die we are gone.”
    Light was beginning to dawn in the Mole’s mind, and with it came a sense of release. If this was to be the nature of Toad’s immortality then the River Bank was safe enough.
    “You mean — ?” began the Mole, beginning to describe with his hands a general form and shape that he imagined might resemble Toad himself.
    “Yes, Mole, I do!” mistaking the Mole’s dawning comprehension for a shared excitement for his scheme. “I mean to erect here the sculpted form of myself, which shall be cast in bronze and will last for many hundreds of years. That same statue, historic and memorable, whose tide shall be Mr Toad of Toad Hall, shall be replicated throughout the world in miniature copies that others, unable to see the real thing, may have their spirits uplifted and their hearts warmed. Like —”
    “Like busts of Beethoven, perhaps, which some keep upon their pianoforte?” offered the Mole.
    “I shall be very like Beethoven, yes,” agreed Toad.
    “Or like those of Garibaldi,” the Mole added with some fervour, for he himself had such a bust and it certainly uplifted his spirits to look at it. The Italian revolutionary had been the Mole’s hero in his youth.
    “Him, too, if you must,” conceded Toad, who knew nothing of Garibaldi.
    He pointed to the surviving pedestal upon the terrace of an old statue long since relegated to the scrap heap.
    “Used to be four of ‘em,” said Toad indifferently “but they fell into disrepair and that solitary pedestal is all that remains. They represented the four Virtues.”
    “I thought there were three Virtues,” said the Mole, “Faith, Hope and Charity.”
    “My father created a fourth for my benefit,” said Toad in a bored voice, “when I was born.”
    The Mole noticed upon the pedestal an inscription in Latin which read, “HUMILITAS SUPER OMNIA”.
    “What does it mean?” he asked.
    “Nothing very much, I shouldn’t wonder,” said Toad. “I was never much of a scholar.”
    “You say that this work commences tomorrow afternoon?” said the Mole, returning to the plans for the garden, now very much easier in his mind than he had been before. If there were nothing more to Toad’s scheme