My first move, of course, was to give her the old oil.
“Well, Aunt Julia,” I began, “you’re looking fine.”
She said I was looking terrible, and asked what I wanted. “Merely to see you, Aunt Julia. Simply to assure myself that you continue in good health. A nephew’s natural anxiety. Still, if you do happen to have a suit of dress clothes on you”
“Why do you want dress clothes? What has become of the suit I bought you?”
“It is a long and sad story.”
“I suppose you sold it.”
“Certainly not. If you think that of me—”
“I do.”
“In that case, I have nothing more to say.”
“Then you had better get out. Tell Wilson to stop the car.” I had no intention of telling Wilson to stop the car until I had reasoned and pleaded. I did so all the way to the station, but without avail.
“Ah, well,” I said, at length abandoning the fruitless discussion. We were standing on the platform by that time. “Then shall we compound for a five, just to keep the books straight?”
Her metallic snort told me that the suggestion had not gone well.
“I would not dream of giving you money. I know you, Stanley. The first thing you would do would be to go and gamble with it.”
And so saying, she got into the train, not even pausing to bestow a farewell kiss, and I stood there shaking in every limb. A boy with a wheeled vehicle tried to interest me in buns, sandwiches and nut chocolate, but I scarcely heard him. Absorbed and distrait, I was examining from every angle the colossal idea which had just leaped into my mind. It was that word “gamble” that had done it. It is often that way with me. The merest hint is enough.
One of the most interesting phenomena of this modern life of ours, Corky, is the tendency of owners of large houses to convert them for the night, or for as many nights as they can manage without being raided, into gambling joints. They buy half a dozen shemmy shoes, some cards and a few roulette wheels and send out word to the sporting element that the doings are on, and the latter come surging round in shoals. With the customary rake-off for the house the profits are enormous.
Why, then, I was asking myself, should I not, during my aunt’s absence, throw The Cedars, Wimbledon Common, open to the pleasure-seeking and scoop in a vast fortune?
I could detect no flaws in the scheme. Always cautious and prudent, I tried hard to find some, but without success.
Once or twice in most lifetimes projects present themselves which the dullest and most naked eye can spot at sight as pure goose, and this was one of them. It was that almost unheard-of rarity, a good thing with no strings attached to it.
Of course, before the venture could become a going concern, there were certain preliminaries that had to be seen to. It would, for instance, be necessary to square Oakshott, who had been left in charge of the premises, and even to cut him in as a partner. For it was he who would have to supply from his savings the capital required for the initial outlay.
Shemmy shoes cost money. So do cards. And you cannot obtain a roulette wheel by mere charm of manner. Obviously, someone would have to do a bit of digging down, and—I, being, as I have shown, a trifle strapped at the moment—everything seemed to point to this butler. But I felt confident that I should be able to make him see that here was his big chance. I had run into him at race meetings once or twice on his afternoon off and knew him to be well equipped with sporting blood. A butler, but one of the boys.
I found Oakshott in his pantry. Dismissing with a gesture the housemaid who was sitting on his knee, I unfolded my proposition. And a few moments later, Corky, you could have knocked me down with a feather! That blighted butler would have none of it. Instead of dancing round in circles on the tips of his toes, strewing roses from his bowler hat and crying “My benefactor!” he pursed his ruddy lips and dished out an unequivocal refusal to cooperate.
I stared at the man, aghast. Then, thinking that he must have failed to grasp the true inwardness of the thing, with all its infinite promise of money for pickles, I went over it all again, speaking slowly and distinctly. But once more all that sprang to his lips was the raspberry.
“Certainly not, sir,” he said with cold rebuke, staring at me like an archdeacon who has found a choir boy sucking acid drops during divine service. “Would you have me betray a position of trust?”
I said that that was the idea in a nutshell, and he said I had surprised and shocked him. He then put on his coat, which he had removed in order to cuddle the housemaid, and showed me to the door.
Well, Corky, old horse, you have often seen me totter beneath the buffets of Fate, only to come up smiling again after a brief interval for rest and recuperation. If you were asked to describe me in a word, the adjective you would probably employ is “resilient,” and you would be right. I am resilient.
But on this occasion I am not ashamed to confess that I felt like throwing in the towel and turning my face to the wall, so terrific had been the blow. I wonder if you have ever been slapped in the eye with a wet fish? I was once, during a religious argument with a fishmonger down Bethnal Green way, and the sensation was almost identical.
I had been so confident that I had wealth within my grasp. That was what stunned the soul and numbed the faculties. It had never so much as occurred to me to associate Oakshott with scruples. It was as if I had had in my possession the winning ticket in the Irish Sweep and the promoters had refused to brass up on the ground that they disapproved of lotteries.
III
I left that butler’s presence a broken man, and for some days went about in a sort of dream. Then I rallied sufficiently to be able to turn my thoughts, if only languidly, to the practical issues of life. I started to try to make arrangements for floating a loan in connection with the purchase of that suit of dress clothes.
But I was not my old self. Twice, from sheer inertia, I allowed good prospects to duck down side streets and escape untouched. And when one morning I ran across Looney Coote in Piccadilly, and said: “Hullo, Looney, old man, you’re looking fine, can you lend me five?” and he affected to believe that I meant five bob and paid off accordingly. I just trousered the money listlessly. How little it all seemed to matter!
You remember Looney Coote, who was at school with us? As crazy a bimbo as ever went through life one jump ahead of the Lunacy Commissioners, but rich beyond dreams of avarice. If he has lingered in your memory at all, it is probably as the bloke with the loudest laugh and the widest grin of your acquaintance. He should have been certified ten years ago, but nobody can say he isn’t sunny.
This morning, however, a cloud was on his brow. He appeared to be brooding on something.
“I’ll swear it wasn’t straight,” I heard him utter. “Do you think it could have been straight?”
“What, Looney, old man?” I asked. Five bob isn’t much, but one has to be civil.
“This game I’ve been telling you about.”
He had’t been telling me about any game, I said and he seemed surprised.
“Haven’t I? I thought I had. I’ve been telling everybody. I went to one of those gambling places last night and got skinned, and, on thinking it over, I’m convinced the game was not on the level.”
The thought of someone as rich as Looney going to gambling places in which I was not financially interested caused the old wound, as you may well imagine, to start throbbing afresh. He asked me what I was snorting about, and I said I wasn’t snorting, I was groaning hollowly.
“Where was this?” I asked.
“Down Wimbledon way. One of those big houses on the Common.”
Corky, there are times when I have a feeling that I must be clairvoyant. As he spoke these words, I did not merely suspect that he was alluding to the Auntery. I knew.
I clutched his sleeve. “This house? What was it called?”
“One of those fatheaded names they have out in those parts. The Beeches, or The Weeping Willows, or something.”
/> “The Cedars?”
“That’s right. You know it, do you? Well, I’ve practically decided to give that nest of crooks a sharp lesson. I’m going—”
I left him. I wanted to be alone, to think; to ponder, Corky; to turn this ghastly thing over in my mind and examine it in pitiless detail … And the more I turned it over and examined it, the more did I recoil in horror from the dark pit into which I was peering. If there is one thing that gives your clean-living, clean-thinking man the pip, it is being compelled to realize to what depths human nature can sink, if it spits on its hands and really gets down to it.
For it was only too revoltingly obvious what had happened. That fiend in butler’s shape had done the dirty on me. He stood definitely revealed as a twister of the first order. From the very moment I had started outlining my proposition, he must have resolved to swipe the fruits of my vision and broad outlook. No doubt he had begun putting matters in train directly I left him.
To go and confront him was with me the work of an instant. Well, not exactly an instant, because it’s a long way to Wimbledon and a cab was not within my means. This time he was in my aunt’s bedroom, having apparently decided to move in there for the duration. I found him reclining in an armchair, smoking a cigar and totting up figures on a sheet of paper, and it was not long before I saw that the fourpence which the journey had cost me was going to be money chucked away.
The idea I had had was that on beholding me the man would quail. But he didn’t. I suppose a man like that doesn’t quail. Quailing, after all, is the result of conscience doing its stuff, and no doubt his conscience had packed up and handed in its portfolio during his early boyhood. When I towered over him with folded arms and said “Serpent!” he merely said “Sir?” and took another suck at the cigar. It made it rather difficult to know what to say next.
However, I got down to it, accusing him roundly of having sneaked my big idea and chiselled me out of my legitimate earnings, and he admitted the charge with a complacent smirk. He even—though with your pure mind, Corky, you will find this hard to believe—thanked me for putting him on to a good thing. Finally, with incredible effrontery, he offered me a flyer in full settlement of all claims, saying that one of these days softheartedness would be his ruin.
First, of course, I took a pop at coercing him into a partnership by threatening to inform my aunt, but he waved this away airily by saying that he knew a few things about me too. And that clinched that, because there was a pretty good chance that he did. Then, laddie, I began to speak my mind.
I am a pretty eloquent chap, when stirred, and I can’t remember leaving out much. Waving away his degrading bribe, I called him names which I had heard second mates use to able-bodied seamen, and others which the able-bodied seamen had used in describing the second mates later on in the privacy of the foc’s’le. Then, turning on my heel, I strode out, pausing at the door to add something which a trimmer had once said to the barman of a Montevideo bar in my presence when the latter had refused to serve him on the ground that he had already had enough. And as I slammed the door, I was filled with a glow of exaltation. It seemed to me that in a difficult situation I had borne myself extremely well.
I don’t know, Corky, if you have ever done the fine, dignified thing, refusing to accept money because it was tainted and there wasn’t enough of it, but I have always noticed on these occasions that there comes a time when the glow of exaltation begins to ebb. Reason returns to its throne, and you find yourself wondering whether in doing the fine, dignified thing you have not behaved like a silly ass.
With me this happened as I was about half-way through a restorative beer at a pub in Jermyn Street. For it was at that moment that the Bottleton East bloke came in and said he had been looking for me everywhere. What he had to tell me was that I must make my decision about that M.C. job within the next twenty-four hours, as the authorities could not hold it open any longer. And the thought that I had deliberately rejected the flyer which would have placed a second-hand suit of dress clothes within my grasp seemed to gash me like a knife.
I assured him that I would let him know next day without fail, and went out, to pace the streets and ponder.
The whole thing was extraordinarily difficult and complex. On the one hand, pride forbade me to crawl back to that inky-souled butler and tell him that I would accept his grimy money after all. And yet, on the other hand …
You see, with old Tuppy out of town I hardly knew where to turn for the ready, and it was imperative that I obtain employment at an early date. And, apart from that, what the bloke had said about watching me standing in the ring in my soup-and-fish had inflamed my imagination. I could see myself dominating that vast audience with upraised hand and, silence secured, informing it that the next item on the programme would be a four-round bout between Porky Jones of Bermondsey and Slugger Smith of the New Cut, or whoever it might be, and I confess that I found the picture intoxicating. The thought of being the cynosure of all eyes, my lightest word greeted with respectful whistles, moved me proudly. Vanity, of course, but is any of us free from it?
That night I set out once more for The Cedars. I was fully alive to the fact that the pride of the Ukridges was going to get one of the worst wallops it had ever sustained, but there are moments when pride has to take the short end.
IV
It was fortunate that I had gone prepared to have my amour propre put through the wringer, for the first thing that happened was that I was refused admittance at the front door because I was not dressed. It was Oakshott himself who inflicted this indignity upon me, bidding me curtly to go round to the back and wait for him in his pantry. He added that he would be glad if I did it quick, as the guests would be arriving shortly. He seemed to think that the sight of what he evidently looked on as a Forgotten Man would distress them.
So I went to the pantry and waited, and presently I could hear cars driving up and merry voices calling to one another and all the other indications of a big night; sounds which, as you may imagine, were like acid to the soul. It must have been nearly an hour before Oakshott condescended to show up, and when he did his manner was curt and forbidding.
“Well?” he said. I tried to think that he had said: “Well, sir?” but I knew he had’t. It was only too plain from the very outset that the butler side of him was in complete abeyance. It was more like being granted an audience by a successful company promoter.
I got down to the res immediately, informing him—for there is never any sense in wasting time on these occasions—that I had been thinking things over and had decided to take that flyer of his. Whereupon he informed me that he had been thinking it over and had decided not to ruddy well let me have it. There was a nasty glint in his eye, as he spoke, which I didn’t like. In the course of a long career I have seen men who wore that indefinable air of not intending to part with flyers, but never one in whom it was so well-marked.
“Your manner this morning was extremely offensive,” he said.
I sank the pride of the Ukridges another notch, and urged him not to allow mere surface manner to influence him. Had he, I asked, never heard of the gruff exterior that covers the heart of gold?
“You called me a—”
“I could not deny it.”
“And a—”
Again I was forced to admit that this was substantially correct. “And just as you were about to leave you turned at the door and called me a — — —”
I saw that something must be done to check this train of thought.
“Did I hurt your feelings, Oakshott?” I said sympathetically. “Did I wound you, Oakshott, old pal? It was quite unintentional. If you had been watching my face, you would have seen a twinkle in my eye. I was kidding you, old friend. These pleasantries are not intended to be taken au pied de la lettre.”
He said he didn’t know what au pied de la lettre meant, and I was supplying a rough diagram when an underling of sorts appeared and told him he was wanted at the front. He left me flat, departin
g without a backward glance, and I started hunting round for the port. There should be some, I felt, in this pantry. “If butlers come, can port be far behind?” is always a pretty safe rule to go on.
I located it eventually in a cupboard, and took a stimulating swig. It was just what I had been needing. It has frequently happened that a good go in at the port at a critical moment has made all the difference to me as a thinking force. The stuff seems to act directly on the little grey cells, causing them to flex their muscles and chuck their chests out. A stiff whisky and soda sometimes has a similar effect, I have noticed, but port never fails.
It did not fail me now. Quite suddenly, as if I had pressed a button, there rose before me a picture of my aunt’s bedroom, and in the foreground of it was the mantelpiece with its handsome clock, worth, I estimated, fully five quid on the hoof.
My aunt is a woman who likes to surround herself with costly objects of vertu, and who shall blame her? She has the price, earned with her gifted pen, and if that is how she feels like spending it, good luck to her, say I. Everywhere throughout her cultured home you will find rich ornaments, on any one of which the most cautious pawnbroker would be delighted to spring a princely sum.
No, Corky, you are wrong. You choose your expressions carelessly. It was not my intention to pinch this clock. The transaction presented itself to my mind purely in the light of a temporary loan. No actual figures had been talked by the representative of the Bottleton East Mammoth Palace of Pugilism, but I considered that I was justified in assuming that for such a post as announcer and master of ceremonies a very substantial salary might be taken as read. Well, dash it, my predecessor had died of cirrhosis of the liver. It costs money to die of cirrhosis of the liver. It seemed to me that it would be child’s play to save enough out of that substantial salary in the first week to de-pop the clock and restore it to its place.
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