The Arthur Morrison Mystery

by Arthur Morrison

  The heavy yellow coat and the flopping satchel sadly incommoded the flying Potter. The coat was buttoned, and he could hardly drop it without stopping; but the satchel was different. He snatched at the strap and flung it over his head, and the act saved him. For the hungry pursuers, seeing him thus apparently abandon his plunder, flung themselves on the satchel in a struggling heap. In a tornado of snatching, grabbing, and scrambling, the scrummage failed at first to realize that the tumbling sandwiches came from the satchel, and they tore and dragged it this way and that, while the innocent welsher pegged away breathlessly a field and a half off.

  But he did not get wholly clear. He was making his best for a path behind a hedge when he was suddenly aware of a fearful apparition approaching from another part of the course—the staring man in the horse-blanket clothes, who came bounding with appalling strides, and whiskers flickering in the breeze like the wings of an avenging angel, to cut him off.

  Mr. Potter was leaving the rest, but this ogre was inevitable. His arms swung like sails on a windmill and his legs seemed to take a field in two leaps.

  “Two pun’—two pun’!” he roared, as he came nearer, shaking a fist like a loaf and spreading a palm like a malt-shovel.

  Mr. Potter steadied his run and plunged his hand into the mass of coins in his pocket. This debt, at any rate, he could pay on the spot—and he’d got to.

  “Two pun’!” repeated the apparition, seizing Mr. Potter’s collar. “Two pun’, yo’ gallus thief!”

  Mr. Potter never hesitated, but popped the two sovereigns into the malt-shovel as though they were red-hot. And the next instant the loaf hit him in the ear and something else—perhaps it was a foot—lifted him from the rear and dropped him in the ditch by the hedge.

  Mr. Potter uprose breathless and dusted his coat. The crowd was no longer near—indeed, it seemed to have stopped—and the ogre in horse-blankets was louping away over the fields, with his whiskers flying over his shoulders. But the misunderstood sportsman wasted no time and took no chances. He put the hedge between himself and the racecourse, and he started for Mugby at a forlorn trot, the money in heavy lumps jingling in his pockets and mocking him as he went.

  It seemed clear that this racing and betting was a villainous and unprincipled business, after all. Even a man whose strict morals would only permit of his betting on a certainty was liable to be tripped up by some shameful technicality like this. It was all scandalous. As to Cripps and Hopkins and Dodson, he was grieved and surprised to find them taking part in it; and in regard to that shopman—but there!

  It was a weary way to Mugby now, and he hurried and worried every yard of it; for his address was known, and he had a horrid apprehension that the mob would besiege him in his house as soon as the races were over. He emerged at last in the familiar High Street, and then remembered what he should have remembered before. Mugby market-day being Saturday, the little branch bank shut on early-closing afternoon instead.

  It was the worst shock he had had since the whisker-man had caught him. But it must not stop him—he would knock up the manager and appeal for help. If he couldn’t get at the money he might do something—lend him some, or guarantee him to the infuriated mob, or something. So Mr. Potter hammered and rang wildly at the private door till a tousle-headed servant appeared, only so far aroused from a nap as to resentful of the disturbance.

  No, Mr. Kenrick wasn’t in. Nor Mrs. Kenrick. Nor not nobody else wasn’t in nohow. And no saying when they would be in.

  Mr. Potter was insistent, desperate. Where was Mr. Kenrick? Where should he go for him?

  The handmaid was unsympathetic. Couldn’t say. “I dunno,” she said at last, “but it’s my belief he’s gone to the races!”

  Mr. Potter’s world was crumbling about him. Here was Kenrick, the bank-manager, type of all solid respectability—gone to the races! Cripps, and Hopkins, and Dodson, and now Kenrick!

  He turned and made for Tubbs’s—the chemist. The only chance now was to get some friend to cash a cheque, or to get several to advance as much as possible till the morning. Tubbs was the most likely.

  Tubbs’s young man, a short youth with a large head, left in charge in case of emergency, looked up from a game of spillikins played with a boxful of matches, and was surprised to be asked for his master.

  “He’s out,” he said. “Didn’t you know?”

  “No,” replied Potter; “where has he gone?”

  “Well, he told me not to say, but it won’t matter to you. He’s gone to the races—in a wagonette.”

  Tubbs, too! And in a wagonette! The world was a worse place than Mr. Potter had ever supposed it—this part, at any rate. He sat down in the shop and gasped his astonishment. The young man sniggered.

  “There’s lots of ’em gone this year that don’t go usually,” he said. “It seems there was a certainty for the Mugby Stakes, and that fetched ’em. Haven’t you been?” he added, pointing suddenly to the field-glasses. Mr. Potter left Tubbs’s sad and apprehensive. These things had all taken time, and the afternoon was waning. What else could he do? He would go to his Aunt Hannah’s, make a clean breast of the whole business—it would certainly come out tomorrow, anyhow—and borrow any money she and Mrs. Potter might have between them.

  He trudged wearily and reluctantly round to the little villa in the lane by the end of the High Street, and was met at the door by a very bright and shiny small servant.

  “Missis?” said the small servant. “No, she’s gone out. Didn’t you know? Her and Mrs. Potter went in a wagonette with Mr. Tubbs and some friends!”

  There was not another illusion left in the world for Mr. Potter—not one. His own wife and—Aunt Hannah! He turned out into the lane to meditate on the depravity of the age. And behold—the wagonette itself coming down the lane!

  He advanced to meet the vehicle as it pulled up. At any rate, Aunt Hannah and his wife should make their confession first; that was tactics.

  And then suddenly, from the depths of the wagonette, there sprang up like a jack-in-the-box, even to the whiskers, the ogre in horse-blanket tweeds! He sprang up and out, and he made for Mr. Potter with a bounce. Mr. Potter ran round by the horses’ heads. What else could he do? The ogre doubled back, and Mr. Potter dodged the other way. The ogre came with a rush up one side of the equipage, shouting, “Eh! Eh! Coom here! I’ll pay yo!” And Mr. Potter went with another rush down the opposite side.

  This was terrible. Everybody stood up in the wagonette and called and chattered unintelligibly. Mr. Potter, on the off-side of the vehicle, saw his aunt’s front door open, and made a wild dive toward it under the carriage. The ogre, about to chase him round behind, saw the plunge, and dived to meet it, from the opposite side. Their heads met with a crash, and they sat together in the road-way, locked in each other’s arms.

  Mr. Potter’s impulse was to scream for help, but the malt-shovel hand was thrust across his mouth, and the ogre said, whispering and thrusting something into his hand, “Shut oop! shut oop! Here’s tha money, and you say nowt o’ me bettin’, see?”

  And truly the two sovereigns were back in Mr. Potter’s hand. He spluttered wildly, and made for the kerb, but found himself gripped by the arm.

  “Shut oop, see?” repeated the ogre. “Magpie crossed his legs and was beat. Shut oop about me bettin’, now!”

  “Why, Uncle Wilkins, what are you doing?” asked Mrs. Potter, by this time safely on the ground with Aunt Hannah beside her. “And you, too, Samuel; what sort of game is this?”

  “Tooch,” replied the divine figure from the north, scrambling out’ and lifting once more his whiskers to the breeze. “Tooch. I were always fond o’ playing tooth, from a lad. Wasn’t we playing tooth?” he added fiercely, turning to Mr. Potter as he rose.

  “Yes, of course,” assented Mr. Potter, hastily. “Capital exercise, touch. I—I felt it would do me good.”

  “But you didn�
�t know Uncle Wilkins, did you?” persisted Mrs. Potter. “He was coming to give us that surprise visit, and went to the Heath station by mistake. We met him there, at the—on the Heath. ‘I’d have known him anywhere; but how did you recognize him?”

  “Oh, I’d know him anywhere, too,” replied the cheesemonger, his mind being chiefly occupied with the blessed realization that the certainty was a failure and all the money in his pockets was really his own after all. “Anywhere—a mile off!”

  “Wonderful how people notice a fine-lookin’ man,” archly observed Aunt Hannah, who had been wishing all the afternoon she had brought her other bonnet.

  “Yes, it is,” agreed Mrs. Potter. “And I am glad to see you and Samuel such friends at once, uncle. Though I did wonder what you were up to, and I certainly never saw Samuel break out like that before. But there—high spirits is catching, no doubt!”

  “I believe they are,” said Mr. Potter, rapidly recovering his equanimity, with his hands deep in his bursting pockets. “I don’t believe I ever felt more high-spirited in my life!”

  FRENZIED FINANCE

  First published in The Strand Magazine, March 1910

  “Yes,” observed Snorkey Timms; “it’s a wonderful thing, is credit.” He filled his pipe from my pouch with a grunt of satisfaction and lit it with a match from my box. He paused in an instinctive motion to drop my property into his pocket, and handed the articles back with a sigh.

  “They tell me,” he pursued, “that there in the City the blokes pay each other thousands o’ quids without brassing up a single real thick ’un—all done on the nod. So that any ’opeful party as slaves away a ’ole night bustin’ a safe there only gets IOU’s an’ things like that, an’ nobody’ll give him a bob a ton for ’em, cos he’s got no credit. It’s just as wonderful in a pub: a chap with credit can get a drink for marks with a bit o’ chalk, an’ the landlord even finds the chalk. Wonderful, ain’t it? I wish I ’ad some. But it seems to be a sort o’ thing you have to be born with.”

  “Born with?” I repeated interrogatively. “Do you mean chalk?” For Snorkey’s philosophy was full of surprises, and the one proposition seemed as reasonable as the other.

  “Credit,” replied Snorkey, with emphasis. “If people ain’t born with it I dunno how they get it—I’ve tried hard enough, all sorts o’ ways. But I don’t believe anybody’s born with it in Shoreditch; it never was a ’ealthy air. We can’t even raise it out of each other down here.” Snorkey smoked in silence for a few seconds, and then laughed aloud. “Ha! ha! Dido Fox!” he burst out. “Dido Fox an’ old Billy Blenkin!”

  “Tell me about Dido Fox and old Billy Blenkin,” I demanded.

  “Billy Blenkin,” Snorkey repeated thoughtfully; “ah, you didn’t know old Billy Blenkin. ’E was a reformed character, ’e was. Ho yus! Sich a moral old party!” Snorkey shut one eye and shook his head with many chuckles. “Billy Blenkin,” he went on, “was a-climbin’ into back winders an’ Bustin’ into safes when I was a innocent nipper a-gettin’ my eddication in Spitalfields Market. He was a clever old ’un, by all accounts; but as he got older he got a bit absent-minded. Now, a absent-minded burglar gets into all sorts of trouble; he sits down in a strange ’ouse to ’ave a bit o’ supper an’ a drink, an’ then he forgets the ’ouse ain’t his, an’ goes to bed, or starts up a song or what not; or he swops his old coat for the best one he can find an’ leaves his ticket-o’-leave in the pocket, with his name an’ address all fine an’ large, or some other silly thing like that. Poor old Billy Blenkin got makin’ so many mistakes that he see clear enough he’d have to retire, afore the judge at the Old Bailey retired him, permanent, as he’d done so often temp’ry. Not only because he made so many mistakes, either; he’d got so well known to the p’lice that they ran him in sort of automatic whenever almost any place was broke into. So poor old Billy had to retire. But a burglar can’t retire so easy as some people might think. In other businesses a man makes a bit ’fore he thinks of retirin’, but it’s quite wonderful to see how little a burglar ever ’as to retire on.”

  “It doesn’t pay,” I interjected. “You know it doesn’t pay in the long run.”

  Snorkey winked genially and screwed his mouth aside.

  “You’ve told me that before,” he said; which was true, for I was young and a little apt to preach. “You’ve told me before though I ain’t quite sich a mug as not to ha’ found it out meself. But there! However you make it, I never ’eard of a gonoph of any sort as ever ’ad enough to retire on unless it was one o’ the big City sort, as is born with credit. Poor old Billy Blenkin ’adn’t, anyhow, an’ he put in a deal o’ thinkin’ ’ow to get a livin’ before a fust-rate plan struck him. When it did strike him at last he wondered it hadn’t been the fust thing he’d thought of. It was jest what you’d expect anybody to think of as was givin’ up burglary. He see the only thing was to ’ave a noo ’art.”

  “A New Art?” I queried. For a moment I had a wild vision of old Billy Blenkin seeking admission to the Guilds of them that design furniture and chintzes in dead-worm curves; and then I understood. “Oh, I see. You mean a new heart?”

  “So I said; a noo ’art.”

  He walked round lookin’ for one o’ them mission-’alls that’s always ready to swaller an old gonoph with a noo ’art, and the wuss he’s been the more they like him. But Billy wasn’t just workin’ the old racket plain; he had ideas of his own. Bein’ a reformed character an’ a moral party don’t pay a cent beyond the fust week or so; then they expect you to work, an’ precious cheap, too. Billy Blenkin ’ad ’is eye on something better than that. He found his mission-’all all right, an’ got on famous with the ringleaders; an’ then he let on his noo idea, which was lectures on his wicked life, illustriated with his beautiful kit o’ burglar’s tools.

  “The idea did fust-rate for a bit, an’ Billy Blenkin was quite the fashion at tea-fights an’ pleasant Sunday afternoons. It was wonderful how it pleased all them respectable parties to be showed ’ow to screw a lock with a filed-out key, or bust a safe with a nice little james, made in jints. An’ Billy allus finished up by showin’ a bottle o’ whisky, which he put all the blame on.

  “‘Ah, my friends,’ says old Billy, ‘this ’ere’s the enemy what made me go wrong! Here he is! See me shake ’im! He’s my prisoner now,’ says he, ‘arter I been his so many times. No more of ’im! I keep ’im by me now jist to remind me, an’ jist to spite ’im. I’ve done with ’im, and ’e can’t hurt me now!’

  “This allus brought down the ’ouse an’ made a difference in the collection. But poor old Billy’s luck never would last, an’ he made them lectures that fascinatin’, an’ the Pleasant Sunday Endeavours got that interested an’ enthusiastic, that several of ’em got run in for tryin’ experiments on their own. It seems this wasn’t what the mission-’all parties wanted at all, an’ they complained very serious to Billy. They said he was makin ’isself a deal too interestin’ an’ it was unsettlin’ the minds o’ the congregation, as hadn’t been used to it; an’ to ’ave ’arf the Band of ’Ope in the jug for ’ousebreakin’ was quite unpresidented. Moreover, they said it wasn’t always the same bottle o’ whisky as he showed at the end o’ the lecture, an’ that looked suspicious. So Billy got sarcastic an’ told ’em they seemed to ’ave a better eye for a bottle o’ whisky than some o’ the most experienced boozers of ’is acquaintance, an’ he wondered ’ow they got so clever. An’ with that all the fat was in the fire, an’ they suspended the lectures an’ called a special committee meetin’ to consider ’is conduck.

  “Now it happened about this time that Dido Fox had found a beautiful place for a bust.”

  Such is my disgraceful familiarity with the tongue of the disreputable that I knew what Snorkey meant. “A beautiful place for a bust” was not, as some might suppose, a convenient spot for a carousal, but a house at which a profitable burglary might be perpetrated. Snorkey went on.


  “It was sich a beautiful place,” he said “that Dido half thought, at first, of keepin’ it to himself, though it was really a place that wanted two—most places any good do. But one thing was quite plain—whether he did it alone or with a pal, it wanted a good set o’ tools, an’ a good set o’ tools was just what Dido Fox hadn’t got. Dido Fox hadn’t got ’em, but old Billy Blenkin had. So Dido went round to old Billy Blenkin an’ wanted to borrow his.

  “‘H’m!’ says old Billy. Want ’em for a lecture, I suppose? They’re a fast-rate set o’ tools for a lecture!’

  “‘No, I want ’em for a job,’ says Dido, as hadn’t caught on to old Billy’s noo refined way o’ talkin’.

  “‘We never call a lecture a job,’ says old Billy, very solemn; it’s low. Well, I’ll lend you the tools; but I shall have to charge you—rather high. I expect it’s a particular good lecture you want ’em for; a common one you could do without ’em.’

  “‘Well, it’s pretty fair,’ says Dido. I’ll pay when the job’s done.’

  “Old Billy shook his head very decided. ‘No,’ says he, ‘arterwards won’t do. It ’ud be wrong o’ me to encourage you to get in debt; it’s bad for a young man like you. You’ll have to leave a deposit of five pound on them tools, an’ I’ll give you back three of ’em when you’ve busted the—the lecture.’

  “‘Can’t do it,’ says Dido. ‘What d’ye want a deposit for? ’Fraid I’ll pinch the tools?’

  “‘Why, no,’ says old Billy, I should ’ope not; but I’ve had experience o’ them lectures like what you want the tools for. Sometimes you get that enthusiastic over ’em you get quite carried away, an’ your friends don’t see you again for years. I can’t afford to lose them tools.’

  “‘But I’m ’ard up,’ says Dido Fox; ‘I sha’n’t have the money till after I’ve done the—well, the lecture, an’ sold the stuff.’