Sherlock Holmes – and even, on one of his bright days, Doctor Watson – could have told at a glance which of those muffled figures was Mr Flannery. He was the only one who went in instead of out at the waist-line. All the others were well up in the class of man whom Julius Caesar once expressed a desire to have about him. And pre-eminent among them in stoutness, dampness and general misery was Mr Lester Carmody, of Rudge Hall.
The fact that Mr Carmody was by several degrees the most unhappy-looking member of this little band of martyrs was due to his distress, unlike that of his fellow-sufferers, being mental as well as physical. He was allowing his mind, for the hundredth time, to dwell on the paralysing cost of these hygienic proceedings.
Thirty guineas a week, thought Mr Carmody as he bounded up and down. Four pound ten a day. . . . Three shillings and ninepence an hour. . . . Three solid farthings a minute. . . . To meditate on these figures was like turning a sword in his heart. For Lester Carmody loved money as he loved nothing else in this world except a good dinner.
Doctor Twist turned from the window. A maid had appeared bearing a card on a salver.
'Show him in,' said Doctor Twist, having examined this. And presently there entered a lissom young man in a grey flannel suit.
'Doctor Twist?'
'Yes, sir.'
The newcomer seemed a little surprised. It was as if he had been expecting something rather more impressive, and was wondering why, if the proprietor of Healthward Ho had the ability which he claimed, to make New Men for Old, he had not taken the opportunity of effecting some alterations in himself. For Doctor Twist was a small man, and weedy. He had a snub nose, features of a markedly simian cast and an expression of furtive slyness. And he wore a waxed moustache.
However, all this was not the visitor's business. If a man wishes to wax his moustache, it is a matter between himself and his God.
'My name's Carmody,' he said. 'Hugo Carmody.'
'Yes. I got your card.'
'Could I have a word with my uncle?'
'Sure, if you don't mind waiting a minute. Right now,' explained Doctor Twist, with a gesture towards the window, 'he's occupied.'
Hugo moved to the window, looked out, and started violently.
'Great Scott!' he exclaimed.
He gaped down at the group below. Mr Carmody and colleagues had now discarded the skipping-ropes and were performing some unpleasant-looking bending and stretching exercises, holding their hands above their heads and swinging painfully from what one may loosely term their waists. It was a spectacle well calculated to astonish any nephew.
'How long has he got to go on like that?' asked Hugo, awed.
Doctor Twist looked at his watch.
'They'll be quitting soon now. Then a cold shower and rub down, and they'll be through till lunch.'
'Cold shower?'
'Yes.'
'You mean to say you make my Uncle Lester take cold shower-baths?'
'That's right.'
'Good God!'
A look of respect came into Hugo's face as he gazed upon this master of men. Anybody who, in addition to making him tie himself in knots under a blazing sun, could lure Uncle Lester within ten yards of a cold shower-bath was entitled to credit.
'I suppose after all this,' he said, 'they do themselves pretty well at lunch?'
'They have a lean mutton chop apiece, with green vegetables and dry toast.'
'Is that all?'
'That's all.'
'And to drink?'
'Just water.'
'Followed, of course, by a spot of port?'
'No, sir.'
'No port?'
'Certainly not.'
'You mean – literally – no port?'
'Not a drop. If your old man had gone easier on the port, he'd not have needed to come to Healthward Ho.'
'I say,' said Hugo, 'did you invent that name?'
'Sure. Why?'
'Oh, I don't know. I just thought I'd ask.'
'Say, while I think of it,' said Doctor Twist, 'have you any cigarettes?'
'Oh, rather.' Hugo produced a bulging case. 'Turkish this side, Virginian that.'
'Not for me. I was only going to say that when you meet your uncle just bear in mind he isn't allowed tobacco.'
'Not allowed . . .? You mean to say you tie Uncle Lester into a lover's knot, shoot him under a cold shower, push a lean chop into him accompanied by water, and then don't even let the poor old devil get his lips round a single gasper?'
'That's right.'
'Well, all I can say is,' said Hugo, 'it's no life for a refined Nordic.'
Dazed by the information he had received, he began to potter aimlessly about the room. He was not particularly fond of his uncle: Mr Carmody Senior's practice of giving him no allowance and keeping him imprisoned all the year round at Rudge would alone have been enough to check anything in the nature of tenderness: but he did not think he deserved quite all that seemed to be coming to him at Healthward Ho.
He mused upon his uncle. A complex character. A man with Lester Carmody's loathing for expenditure ought by rights to have been a simple liver, existing off hot milk and triturated sawdust like an American millionaire. That Fate should have given him, together with his prudence in money matters, a recklessness as regarded the pleasures of the table seemed ironic.
'I see they've quit,' said Doctor Twist, with a glance out of the window. 'If you want to have a word with your uncle you could do it now. No bad news, I hope?'
'If there is, I'm the one that's going to get it. Between you and me,' said Hugo, who had no secrets from his fellow-men, 'I've come to try to touch him for a bit of money.'
'Is that so?' said Doctor Twist, interested. Anything to do with money always interested the well-known American physician and physical culture expert.
'Yes,' said Hugo. 'Five hundred quid, to be exact.'
He spoke a little despondently, for, having arrived at the window again, he was in a position now to take a good look at his uncle. And so forbidding had bodily toil and mental disturbance rendered the latter's expression that he found the fresh young hopes with which he had started out on this expedition rapidly ebbing away. If Mr Carmody were to burst – and he looked as if he might do so at any moment – he, Hugo, being his nearest of kin, would inherit: but, failing that, there seemed to be no cash in sight whatever.
'Though when I say "touch",' he went on, 'I don't mean quite that. The stuff is really mine. My father left me a few thousand, you see, but most injudiciously made Uncle Lester my trustee, and I'm not allowed to get at the capital without the old blighter's consent. And now a pal of mine in London has written offering me a half share in a new night-club which he's starting if I will put up five hundred pounds.'
'I see.'
'And what I ask myself,' said Hugo, 'is, will Uncle Lester part? That's what I ask myself.'
'From what I have seen of Mr Carmody, I shouldn't say that parting was the thing he does best.'
'He's got absolutely no gift for it whatever,' said Hugo gloomily.
'Well, I wish you luck,' said Doctor Twist. 'But don't you try to bribe him with cigarettes.'
'Do what?'
'Bribe him with cigarettes. After they have been taking the treatment for a while, most of these birds would give their soul for a coffin-nail.'
Hugo started. He had not thought of this; but, now that it had been called to his attention, he saw that it was most certainly an idea.
'And don't keep him standing around longer than you can help. He ought to get under that shower as soon as possible.'
Hugo had an idea.
'I suppose I couldn't tell him that owing to my pleading and persuasion you've consented to let him off a cold shower today?'
'No, sir.'
'It would help,' urged Hugo. 'It might just sway the issue, as it were.'
'Sorry. He must have his shower. When a man's been exercising and has got himself into a perfect lather of sweat . . .'
'Keep it clean
,' said Hugo coldly. 'There is no need to stress the physical side. Oh, very well, then, I suppose I shall have to trust to tact and charm of manner. But I wish to goodness I hadn't got to spring business matters on him on top of what seems to have been a slightly hectic morning.'
He shot his cuffs, pulled down his waistcoat, and walked with a resolute step out of the room. He was about to try to get into the ribs of a man who for a lifetime had been saving up to be a miser and who, even apart from this trait in his character, held the subversive view that the less money young men had the better for them. Hugo was a gay optimist, cheerful of soul and a mighty singer in the bath-tub, but he could not feel very sanguine. However, the Carmodys were a bulldog breed. He decided to have a pop at it.
Theoretically, no doubt, the process of exercising flaccid muscles, opening hermetically sealed pores and stirring up a liver which had long supposed itself off the active list ought to engender in a man a jolly sprightliness. In practice, however, this is not always so. That Lester Carmody was in no radiant mood was shown at once by the expression on his face as he turned in response to Hugo's yodel from the rear. In spite of all that Health-ward Ho had been doing to Mr Carmody this last ten days, it was plain that he had not yet got that Kruschen feeling.
Nor, at the discovery that a nephew whom he had supposed to be twenty miles away was standing at his elbow, did anything in the nature of sudden joy help to fill him with sweetness and light.
'How the devil did you get here?' were his opening words of welcome. His scarlet face vanished for an instant into the folds of a large handkerchief; then reappeared, wearing a look of acute concern. 'You didn't,' he quavered, 'come in the Dex-Mayo?'
A thought to shake the sturdiest man. It was twenty miles from Rudge Hall to Healthward Ho, and twenty miles back again from Healthward Ho to Rudge Hall. The Dex-Mayo, that voracious car, consumed a gallon of petrol for every ten miles it covered. And for a gallon of petrol they extorted from you nowadays the hideous sum of one shilling and sixpence halfpenny. Forty miles, accordingly, meant – not including oil, wear and tear of engines and depreciation of tyres – a loss to his purse of over six shillings – a heavy price to pay for the society of a nephew whom he had disliked since boyhood.
'No, no,' said Hugo hastily. 'I borrowed John's two-seater.'
'Oh,' said Mr Carmody, relieved.
There was a pause, employed by Mr Carmody in puffing; by Hugo in trying to think of something to say that would be soothing, tactful, ingratiating and calculated to bring home the bacon. He turned over in his mind one or two conversational gambits.
('Well, Uncle, you look very rosy.'
?
Not quite right.
'I say, Uncle, what ho the School-Girl Complexion?'
Absolutely no! The wrong tone altogether.
Ah! That was more like it. 'Fit.' Yes, that was the word.)
'You look very fit, Uncle,' said Hugo.
Mr Carmody's reply to this was to make a noise like a buffalo pulling its foot out of a swamp. It might have been intended to be genial, or it might not. Hugo could not tell. However, he was a reasonable young man, and he quite understood that it would be foolish to expect the milk of human kindness instantly to come gushing like a geyser out of a two-hundred-and-twenty-pound uncle who had just been doing bending and stretching exercises. He must be patient and suave – the Sympathetic Nephew.
'I expect it's been pretty tough going, though,' he proceeded. 'I mean to say, all these exercises and cold showers and lean chops and so forth. Terribly trying. Very upsetting. A great ordeal. I think it's wonderful the way you've stuck it out. Simply wonderful. It's character that does it. That's what it is. Character. Many men would have chucked the whole thing up in the first two days.'
'So would I,' said Mr Carmody, 'only that damned doctor made me give him a cheque in advance for the whole course.'
Hugo felt damped. He had had some good things to say about character, and it seemed little use producing them now.
'Well, anyway, you look very fit. Very fit indeed. Frightfully fit. Remarkably fit. Extraordinarily fit.' He paused. This was getting him nowhere. He decided to leap straight to the point at issue. To put his fortune to the test, to win or lose it all. 'I say, Uncle Lester, what I really came about this afternoon was a matter of business.'
'Indeed? I supposed you had come merely to babble. What business?'
'You know a friend of mine named Fish?'
'I do not know a friend of yours named Fish.'
'Well, he's a friend of mine. His name's Fish.'
'What about him?'
'He's starting a new night-club.'
'I don't care,' said Mr Carmody, who did not.
'It's just off Bond Street, in the heart of London's pleasure-seeking area. He's calling it The Hot Spot.'
The only comment Mr Carmody vouchsafed on this piece of information was a noise like another buffalo. His face was beginning to lose its vermilion tinge, and it seemed possible that in a few moments he might come off the boil.
'I had a letter from him this morning. He says he will give me a half share if I put up five hundred quid.'
'Then you won't get a half share,' predicted Mr Carmody.
'But I've got five hundred. I mean to say, you're holding a lot more than that in trust for me.'
'Holding,' said Mr Carmody, 'is the right word.'
'But surely you'll let me have this quite trivial sum for a really excellent business venture that simply can't fail? Ronnie Fish knows all about night-clubs. He's practically lived in them since he came down from Cambridge.'
'I shall not give you a penny. Have you no conception of the duties of a trustee? Trust money has to be invested in gilt-edged securities.'
'You'll never find a gilter-edged security than a night-club run by Ronnie Fish.'
'If you have finished this nonsense I will go and take my shower-bath.'
'Well, look here, Uncle, may I invite Ronnie to Rudge, so that you can have a talk with him?'
'You may not. I have no desire to talk with him.'
'You'd like Ronnie. He has an aunt in the looney-bin.'
'Do you consider that a recommendation?'
'No, I just mentioned it.'
'Well, I refuse to have him at Rudge.'
'But listen, Uncle. The vicar will be round any day now to get me to perform at the village concert. If Ronnie were on the spot, he and I could do the Quarrel Scene from Julius Caesar and really give the customers something for their money. We used to do it at Smokers up at Cambridge and it went big.'
Even this added inducement did not soften Mr Carmody.
'I will not invite your friends to Rudge.'
'Right ho,' said Hugo, a game loser. He was disappointed, but not surprised. All along he had felt that that Hot Spot business was merely a Utopian dream. There are some men who are temperamentally incapable of parting with five hundred pounds, and his uncle Lester was one of them. But in the matter of a smaller sum it might be that he would prove more pliable, and of this smaller sum Hugo had urgent need. 'Well, then, putting that aside,' he said, 'there's another thing I'd like to chat about for a moment, if you don't mind.'
Mr Carmody said he did.
'There's a big fight on tonight at the Albert Hall. Eustace Rodd and Cyril Warburton are going twenty rounds for the Welter-Weight Championship. Have you ever noticed,' said Hugo, touching on a matter to which he had given some thought, 'a rather odd thing about boxers these days? A few years ago you never heard of one that wasn't Beefy this or Porky that or Young Cat's-meat or something. But now they're all Claudes and Harolds and Cuthberts. And when you consider that the heavyweight champion of the world is actually named Eugene, it makes you think a bit. However, be that as it may, these two birds are going twenty rounds tonight, and there you are.'
'What,' inquired Mr Carmody, 'is all this drivel?'
He eyed his young relative balefully. In an association that had lasted many years, he had found Hugo consistently irri
tating to his nervous system, and he was finding him now rather more trying than usual.
'I only meant to point out that Ronnie Fish has sent me a ticket, and I thought that, if you were to spring a tenner for the necessary incidental expenses – bed, breakfast and so on . . . well, there I would be, don't you know.'
'You mean you wish to go to London to see a boxing contest?'
'That's it.'
'Well, you're not going. You know I have expressly forbidden you to visit London. The last time I was weak enough to allow you to go there, what happened? You spent the night in the police station.'
'Yes, but that was Boat-Race night.'
'And I had to pay five pounds for your fine.'
Hugo dismissed the past with a gesture.
'The whole thing,' he said, 'was an unfortunate misunderstanding, and, if you ask me, the verdict of Posterity will be that the policeman was far more to blame than I was. They're letting a bad type of man into the Force nowadays. I've noticed it on several occasions. Besides, it won't happen again.'
'You are right. It will not.'
'On second thoughts, then, you will spring that tenner?'
'On first, second, third and fourth thoughts I will do nothing of the kind.'
'But, Uncle, do you realize what it would mean if you did?'
'The interpretation I would put upon it is that I was suffering from senile decay.'
'What it would mean is that I should feel you trusted me, Uncle Lester, that you had faith in me. There's nothing so dangerous as a want of trust. Ask anybody. It saps a young man's character.'
'Let it,' said Mr Carmody callously.
'If I went to London, I could see Ronnie Fish and explain all the circumstances about my not being able to go into that Hot Spot thing with him.'