Delphi Complete Works of Arthur Morrison

by Arthur Morrison

  On the other hand, old Keeble and I were to weigh in our explanations in a blessed chorus.

  As I turned it over, the humour of the thing came uppermost, and it gradually presented itself in the light of a prodigious lark. Old Keeble would know nothing about the arranged chorus, and when I turned up, all ready for the fun, he would be rather off his game. I spent half the night thinking out my part.

  But it wasn’t needed — not a line. I got to the office pretty early in the morning, but only just before old Keeble; and when he came in, he came like a firework, and he was bald as a coot, head and chin and all! All his wavy locks and every hair of his beard was gone, and anything less like Moses you couldn’t invent. You’d only have known him by his clothes.

  “Look at this!” he blared. “I’m ruined! I can’t show myself for half a year! This is what comes of that old fool’s experiments! I must ha’ got some of the spores or something out of that stuff of his into my beard yesterday. I thought I felt something gummy in it, and as soon as I began to wash, it was all a mess of that infernal jelly, and the more I washed the worse it went, till it was all over my head and I could feel it gnawing into my skin! I thought I was goin’ stark ravin’ mad! I rolled over in the bedclothes and wiped it off on the sheets, and I got up like this! Not a hair on my head — not a hair! I rubbed it all over with vaseline and stopped the gnawing, or I believe it would have eaten my head off! And while I was doin’ that it ate the bed-clothes, and I left it comin’ downstairs, gobblin’ up the stair carpet!”

  He fell back into a chair for a moment, blown; and then he jumped up and went for the back room. “I’ll exterminate the stuff and Burridge too!” he yelled.

  Poor old Burridge was busy with his jim-jams, and wasn’t prepared to receive cavalry so to speak. Old Keeble burst in on him like a bomb-shell, and before I could interfere, he’d swept off a whole tableful of retorts and things, and whacked the jar of myxomycetes into the fireplace. It smashed into fifty thousand bits, and Burridge set up a howl like a tortured soul.

  “The spores’ll be everywhere,” he yelled scrapin’ at the stuff with the fire-shovel.

  “Yes — have some of ‘em!” bawls Keeble firin’ another jar at his head.

  It hit the wall and scattered everywhere and then I grabbed Keeble, and Stibbins and Crump came in and pacified him with office-rulers. Stibbins had paid hard money for the stuff in the office, and he was sensitive about it.

  Presently I left them trying to clean up and slipped out to keep my appointment with Miss Gunter. I hadn’t to wait long at the end of the court before I saw the spankin’ landaulette sailin’ up.

  “Well,” says Miss Gunter, “and where’s the other penitent?”

  I explained the accident. “It’s a most unfortunate occurrence,” I said, “and I expect it’ll be a long time before he’s visible. Some might call it a judgment!”

  “So they might,” says she. “And where’s your judgment?”

  “That,” I said, “I am content to leave in your hands. At any rate, this unfortunate accident gives me the opportunity of expressing, unheard but by you, my gratitude for the angelic influence — yours, Miss Gunter — which has made another and a better man of me. Partly in my innocence, led away by evil persons — older men I may say, much older — and partly, let me confess it with a new heart, tempted by the prospect of gain held out to me, I was about to engage — had begun to engage, in fact — in an enterprise of questionable probity; when suddenly, by the magic of your presence, your manner your words, your better, nobler influence, for which, if I may offer the devotion of a lifetime—”

  “Why, bless me,” says Miss Gunter, “Ido believe you’re making love to me; nobody ever did that before. I thought your venerable friend was beginning yesterday, and I was so sorry I hadn’t time to let him go on. But don’t you stop, on any account. Come inside the car — it’s beginning to rain!”

  So it was. It was ploppin’ heavily on my new hat and all over the best suit of clothes I ever had. So I nipped inside, and went on.

  “Your woman’s heart,” I said, “your divine instinct has told you the truth. Agatha! If I may call you so — I saw the charming name on your card — Agatha—”

  “Why, what’s the matter with your hat?” she said, suddenly, staring at it through her glasses.

  I whipped it off, and there, in great blobs, was that unholy jelly — myxomycetes! The stuff and its spores had flown everywhere in the scrimmage, and now the rain had finished the job, and the blobs were running together in masses! And even while I stared, fascinated and horrified, a great dollop fell flop on Miss Gunter’s dress and began to spread! More, I was coming out in great spots of jelly all over my clothes, my boots — everywhere!

  A full comprehension of the state of affairs struck Miss Gunter in a flash. She sprang up with a yelp I shouldn’t have expected of her and shoved me out into the street.

  The unspeakable jelly was climbing all over me, but I gasped “Agatha! Agatha!” and I heard her scream to the chauffeur, “Home! Home! As fast as you can go! Never mind the speed limit!”

  It was the end of love’s young dream. What happened to that dear lady in that expensive car I never knew, though I often try to imagine. There was nothing in the carriage part of the car that myxomycetes wouldn’t eat, except the metal fittings, and it depended entirely on an uncertain equation of distance home, blocks in traffic, and speed of car, whether or not that stony maiden lady arrived home on a bare iron chassis, clad in a mass of jelly.

  But for the moment my business was to get into the office, and I ran, with my clothes and boots melting off me as I went. I rushed up the stairs and into the office. And there the sight was appalling. Myxomycetes was crawling everywhere and eating everything, and nothing stopped it but the stone passage at the outer door. Carpet, chairs, tables, wainscot — everything. It was the most unholy scrape I ever was in. I got home somehow, in five bob’s worth of rags from Houndsditch; and we left that office with nobody but myxomycetes to settle with the landlord.

  SPORTS OF MUGBY

  I.

  MR. SAMUEL POTTER, cheese-monger and provision merchant, looked out from his shop-door and surveyed High Street, Mugby, on the morning of the day of Mugby Races with a pleasurable internal thrill, not unqualified by a certain flutter of trepidation; it was the thrill, in fact, of the unaccustomed plotter, the flutter of the beginner in secret adventure.

  Mugby High Street was the picture of tradesmanlike respectability, and in all Mugby there was no milder pattern of respectability in appearance, than Mr. Samuel Potter himself; which is as much as to say that there was no milder pattern in the world. For the world contained no duller place than Mugby where, if dullness were not always respectability, at any rate respectability was always dullness. Such a pattern was Mr. Potter — in appearance; and his visible ambitions went not a yard beyond the border of Mugby. But if you could have read the ambitions that were not visible, if you could have plumbed the imaginings of his inmost soul — why, then you would have been surprised as no doubt you would be if you could similarly penetrate anybody else.

  Mugby Races were a nuisance — that every respectable tradesman in Mugby agreed. True, they were at Mugby Heath, three miles off, with a separate railway-station; but Mugby itself and all its tradesmen were so very respectable that they felt a contamination of rowdiness even three miles off, and as a matter of fact, the three miles precluded any benefit to Mugby trade. It was a fool of a distance altogether.

  Mugby Races always fell on early-closing day, and the Mugby shops closed on that day even a little earlier than usual, to emphasize the general disapproval of the anniversary. This morning Mr. Potter surveyed successively the shop-fronts of Cripps the greengrocer, Hopkins the undertaker, Tubbs the chemist and Dodson the draper, and wondered vaguely which would be most horrified could he have guessed at the desperate project slumbering in the brain of himself, Potter the cheesemonger.

  Mr. Potter’s visible ambition spread not
a yard beyond High Street, Mugby, as I have said; but if you could have pierced below the respectable surface and read his inmost mind, you would have found him a terrible fellow — a sportsman, no less.

  But this secret, interior sportsmanship was wholly platonic — the mere private habit of an imaginative lifetime. From boyhood up in his secret self-communings, Mr. Potter had pictured himself engaged in phantasmagorial feats of sport: bringing down a brace of grouse on one side and a pheasant and a rabbit on the other, with a clean right-and-left from the same trusty rifle with which he had bowled over a magnificent stag at a thousand yards’ range not five minutes before; leading the field, hounds and all, in a gallant burst straight across a dangerous country obstructed by many seven-foot brick walls, and riding down the fox in a spinney after a ten-mile gallop; beating both ‘Varsity eights alone in a sculling outrigger for Doggett’s coat and badge; hooking the largest conger-eel on record with the dry fly; and scoring a century of goals off his own bat for his county in Association Rugger. From all which it may be perceived that Mr. Potter’s sportsmanship was of the most highly theoretical and ideal not to say ghostly, character; and the mind is the better prepared for the desperate project lurking that fine morning in Mr. Potter’s breast. He was going to Mugby Races!

  Not brazenly, openly, before the shocked eyes of his fellow-townsmen, but deviously across meadows, with all the horrid joy of a stealthy adventure. Moreover, he was going to bet on a horse.

  It arose through Bigsby. Bigsby was a commercial traveller in lard, and he looked in on Mr. Potter once a fortnight. Bigsby was no sculler or gunner, but a far more desperate character, whose darkling fascination grew on Mr. Potter every fortnight. Bigsby knew all about races and the horses running in them; and, more, he freely communicated his information. He told Mr. Potter — when it was certain that neither Mrs. Potter nor the shopman was listening — what was a certainty for the Derby, a dead snip for the Cesarewitch, and a perfect ankle-biter for the City and Suburban. And when, a year ago, he had prophesied a positively inevitable for the Mugby Stakes itself, and the horse had won, Mr. Potter had become strangely excited.

  After that he paid special attention to Bigsby’s vaticinations. Mostly he found he had forgotten the name of the horse — they were such odd names — as soon as Bigsby had left; but two or three times he remembered and on these rare occasions, stealthily consulting the sporting column of his daily paper after the race, he ascertained that the traveller had really picked the right horse each time out of any number from a dozen to a score. Mr. Potter began to think the matter over very seriously.

  He took a stump of pencil, a bill-head, and some rules of arithmetic. A bet of a sovereign on each of the horses whose performances he had verified would have produced a total profit of seventeen pounds ten. Consequently, one of five pounds on each horse would have brought in eighty-seven pounds ten, and by the same process he perceived that a bet of fifty pounds would have made eight hundred and seventy-five, and one of but you could go on multiplying to any extent, and the prospect was dazzling. The cheesemongery was all right, in a humdrum sort of way, but nothing like this.

  Of course there were serious arguments against betting; all sorts of ruin followed when you lost, and nothing could be less respectable than ruin. But if you only made bets when winning was certain (and Bigsby was astonishing) — why, then, eh? What could be more profitable and, for that reason proper?

  This was the state of Mr. Potter’s cogitations when the time of Mugby Races was coming round again. This time Bigsby was more positive than ever. In fact, he was rather sorry that the result was so wholly foregone and indisputable; he would much have preferred the credit of picking out the winner from a doubtful field. But as things stood there was only one in it — Magpie, of course. Nothing but a loaded gun, fired straight at the quadruped’s head, could prevent Magpie winning the Mugby Stakes by the length of a street.

  “It will be simply a sinful throwing away of money,” said Bigsby, “not to back Magpie — if you can get on. The nuisance is that everybody knows it, and the price is so short. Evens Magpie, as early as this, in a field of very near twenty — well, you know what that means.”

  Mr. Potter didn’t know in the least, but he nodded sagaciously, and then glanced nervously along the counter, lest he were overheard.

  “I’ve never laid a bet,” he said; “but of course it would be all right when it’s quite certain.”

  The word “bet” left Mr. Potter’s lips with a strange shock. It seemed not quite a proper word. It had a bold, raffish flavour and even from the days of his upbringing he had formed the habit of dodging it conversationally with the milder substitute “lay”— “I lay we won’t come, after all”; “It’s upstairs, I’ll lay anything,” and so on.

  “Of course it would be all right when it’s quite certain,” said Mr. Potter.

  “Why, of course,” replied Bigsby. “But Magpie’s almost too much of a certainty. Spoils the race — nothing else in it. It’ll be odds on before the day, and not easy to get on at that.”

  Truly, as Bigsby had said, it would seem sheer improvidence to neglect such an opportunity as this. Ordinary betting, of course was quite indefensible. But when one saw the opportunity of acquiring just as much money as one might arrange for, and at the expense of a low bookmaker — well, what respectable tradesman could hesitate about the propriety of that?

  “I will lay,” said Mr. Potter to himself dodging the raffish word again; “I will go to the races and lay on Magpie. Nobody will know but myself. It will be early-closing day, and Maria will go to my aunt’s.”

  Moreover, when he had won all the money he could get, he would make Maria a handsome present, and so atone for any furtiveness that might oppress his conscience; and in the same way he would cut out that bounceable person, Dodson the draper, who had just put his name down conspicuously for ten pounds in the subscription raised to clear off the debt incurred by the last bazaar in aid of the chapel funds.

  There was a lack of excitement about cheesemongery in Mugby which bored the secretly romantic soul of Potter, and, as a fact, if he had but known it, all his sporting aspirations were nothing but the natural rebellion of that same secretly romantic soul. For years the one excitement vouchsafed him had been the anticipation of a visit from Maria’s rich Uncle Wilkins from the north which had never come off. Maria had always believed that, once her Uncle Wilkins had been made acquainted with Samuel, great good fortune would somehow follow. Uncle Wilkins would certainly, at the lowest, make a large corner for Samuel in his will, and, more probably, struck by his nephew’s business capacity, he would “put something into” the business. Long had Mrs. Potter cherished these hopes, and had brought Potter himself to share them; often had the invitation been extended to Uncle Wilkins, and as often had Uncle Wilkins promised to “drop down on them” unexpectedly at some odd time. But Uncle Wilkins had never come, and even Maria’s hope had waned, while to the ardent soul of Mr. Potter the indefinite prospect of a surprise visit from his wife’s uncle was all too inadequate a supply of excitement to outlast the years. And so, by revulsion of spirit, Uncle Wilkins’s neglect made Samuel Potter a sportsman.

  Thus, in the state of mind produced by all this internal disturbance, Mr. Potter looked out on Mugby High Street on the morning of race day. Such was the disgust of the Mugby tradesmen at the races that the shutters always went up a little before the regular time on race-day, and somehow to-day they went up sooner than ever. There was an animated competition between the shutters of Cripps the greengrocer and Hopkins the undertaker, which Cripps’s boy won by a bare shutter. Mr. Potter’s shopman got permission to go early to visit his grandmother’s grave. Mrs. Potter was already gone to Aunt Hannah’s, and nothing remained to hinder the sportsman’s departure.

  II.

  A QUICK step behind, a cry of “Ha! caught you!” and a hand fell on Mr. Potter’s shoulder. He turned with something like a gasp of horror, but it was only Bigsby.

  “
Ha!” cried Bigsby, heartily. “The Mugby contingent goes a-footback to Mugby Races. All alone?”

  “Why, yes,” answered Potter; “I should hope so. There’s sure not to be anybody else from Mugby.” He felt shocked, indeed, at the suggestion. “Why are you here?”

  For the place was a footpath over a field between Mugby and the heath.

  “Got stuck up at Hockwood and missed the train; the one I got in only came to Mugby, and not a thing on wheels to be found. So I’m hoofing it, like you — and we shall just about miss the first race. So trot!”

  Trotting was uncomfortable for Mr. Potter, for, to the best of his ability, he had dressed his part. He had a yellow box-cloth coat, much too hot for the weather, and the brimmiest hat in his possession. Also he had field-glasses on one sling and a satchel on another. These two implements of sport he had fondled lovingly for days, as a boy fondles a new fishing-rod or cricket-bat. There were sandwiches in the satchel, because Mr. Potter could think of nothing else to put in it, and, anyhow, a satchel was the proper thing, as you might see in the illustrated papers. Things that hang on slings will flop when you run, so the trot soon ceased.

  “The Stakes is the second race,” Bigsby remarked, while Potter recovered his breath. “I want to get a bit on Magpie if I can, but it won’t be easy. You might get some sort o’ price at a big meeting, but hardly here. They’ll just bar it, I’m afraid.”

  Mr. Potter’s face fell. If you couldn’t bet on a certainty, what was the good of the whole business? That was the one thing that redeemed the system from depravity; now it all seemed more disgraceful than ever.

  They climbed the last stile and came in view of the heath. The green ring of the course was set about with patches of moving crowd and a confused clamour of shouts told that the first race had started.