‘Since my time. When I was a prominent figure on the turf, George Budd was probably in his cradle, sucking his pink toes.’
‘Well, he isn’t sucking any pink toes now. He’s a tough egg. Bingo Little had a bit on the slate with him last winter, and when he started trying to break it gently to him that he might not be able pay up, this Budd said he did hope he would —’
‘So the modern bookie feels like that, does he? The ones in my time always used to.’
‘— because he said he knew it was silly to be superstitious but he had noticed that every time anyone did him down for money some nasty accident happened to them. He said it was like some sort of fate. And he summoned a great beefy brute called Erb and dangled him before Bingo’s eyes. Erb called on me yesterday.’
‘What did he say?’
‘He didn’t say anything. He seemed to be one of those strong, silent men. He just looked at me and nodded. So if you could possibly see your way, Uncle Fred, to advancing —’
Lord Ickenham shook his head regretfully.
‘Alas, my boy, the ear which you are trying to bite, though not unresponsive, is helpless to assist. There has been a shake-up in the Treasury department here. Some little time ago, your aunt unfortunately decided to take over the family finances and administer them herself, leaving me with just that bit of spending money which a man requires for tobacco, self-respect, golf balls and what not. My limit is a tenner.’
‘Oh, my gosh! And Erb’s going to call again on Wednesday.’
There was a wealth of sympathy and understanding in Lord Ickenham’s eye, as he patted his nephew’s shoulder. He was gazing back across the years and seeing himself, an ardent lad in the twenties, thoughtfully glueing a large black moustache above his lips, his motive being to deceive and frustrate a bygone turf commissioner doing business under the name of Jimmy Timms, the Safe Man.
‘I know just how you must be feeling, my boy. We have all gone through it, from the Archbishop of Canterbury, I imagine, downwards. Thirty-six years ago, almost to this very day, I was climbing out of a window and shinning down a waterspout to avoid a muscular individual named Syd, employed by a bookie who was my creditor at the moment in very much the same executive capacity as this Erb of yours. I got away all right, I remember, though what I have always thought must have been an ormolu clock missed me by inches. There is only one thing to be done. You must touch Horace Davenport.’
A bitter smile wreathed Pongo’s lips.
‘Ha!’ he said briefly.
‘You mean you have already tried? And failed? Too bad. Still, I wouldn’t despair. No doubt you went the wrong way to work. I fancy that we shall find that when tactfully approached by a man of my presence and dignity he will prove far more plastic. Leave it to me. I will get into his ribs for you. There are no limits, literally none, to what I can accomplish in the springtime.’
‘But you can’t come to London.’
‘Can’t come to London? I don’t understand you.’
‘Didn’t Aunt Jane say she would skin you if you did?’
‘In her whimsical way she did say something to that effect, true. But you appear to have forgotten that she is on her way to the South of France.’
‘Yes—leaving Valerie here to keep an eye on you.’
‘I see what you mean. Yes, now that you mention it, there may possibly have been some idea in her mind that Valerie would maintain an affectionate watch over my movements during her absence. But be of good cheer. Valerie is not making a long stay. She will be returning to London with you in your car.’
‘What?’
‘Yes. She does not know it yet — in fact, I understood her to say that she was proposing to remain some weeks — but I think you will find her at your side.’
‘What do you mean? You can’t chuck her out.’
‘My dear boy!’ said Lord Ickenham, shocked. ‘Of course not. But one has one’s methods. Ah, there she is,’ he went on, as a girlish figure came round the corner of the house. ‘Valerie, my dear, here’s Pongo.’
Valerie Twistleton had paused to stare at a passing snail — coldly and forbiddingly, as if it had been Horace Davenport. Looking up, she transferred this cold stare to her brother.
‘So I see,’ she said distantly. ‘What’s he doing here?’ ‘He has come to take you back to London.’
‘I have no intention whatsoever —’Nothing,’ proceeded Lord Ickenham, ‘could be more delightful than to have you with me to cheer my loneliness, but Pongo feels — and I must say I agree with him — that you are making a great mistake in running away like this.’
‘Doing what?’
‘I’m afraid that is the construction people will place on the fact of your leaving London after what has happened. You know what people are. They sneer. They jibe. They laugh behind the back. It will be different, of course, with your real friends. They will merely feel a tender pity. They will look on you as the wounded animal crawling to its lair, and will understand and sympathize. But I repeat that in my opinion you are making a mistake. We Twistletons have always rather prided ourselves on keeping the stiff upper lip in times of trouble, and I confess that if I were in your place my impulse would be to show myself in my usual haunts — gay, smiling, debonair…. Yes, Coggs?’
The butler had appeared from the hall.
‘A trunk call for you, m’lord.’
‘I will come at once. Be thinking it over, my dear.’
For some moments there had been proceeding from Valerie Twistleton a soft noise like the escape of steam. It now ceased, and her teeth came together with a sharp, unpleasant click.
‘Can you wait ten minutes while I pack, Pongo?’ she said. ‘I will try not to keep you longer.’
She passed into the house, and Pongo lit a reverent cigarette. He did not approve of his Uncle Fred, but he could not but admire his work.
Lord Ickenham returned, looking about him.
‘Where’s Valerie?’
‘Upstairs, packing.’
‘Ah, she decided to leave, then? I think she was wise. That was old Emsworth on the ‘phone. I don’t think you’ve met him, have you? Lives at Blandings Castle in Shropshire. I hardly know him myself, but he is the brother of a very old pal of mine. He wants me to lunch with him at his club tomorrow. It will fit in quite nicely. We’ll get this business of Horace over with in the morning. I’ll meet you at the Drones at about twelve. And now come in and have a quick one. Bless my soul, it’s wonderful to think that tomorrow I shall be in London. I feel like a child about to be taken to the circus.’
Pongo’s feelings, as he followed his uncle to the smoking-room, were more mixed. It was stimulating, of course, to think that by his arts the other might succeed in inducing Horace Davenport to join the Share-The-Wealth movement, but the picture of him loose in London was one that tended definitely to knit the brow. As always when Lord Ickenham proposed to share with him the bracing atmosphere of the metropolis, he found himself regarding with apprehension the shape of things to come.
A thoughtful member of the Drones had once put the thing in a nutshell.
‘The trouble with Pongo’s Uncle Fred,’ he had said, and the Drones is about the only place nowadays where you hear sound, penetrating stuff like this, ‘is that, though sixty if a day, he becomes on arriving in London as young as he feels — which is, apparently, a youngish twenty-two. He has a nasty way of lugging Pongo out into the open and there, right in the public eye, proceeding to step high, wide and plentiful. I don’t know if you happen to know what the word “excesses” means, but those are what Pongo’s Uncle Fred, when in London, invariably commits.’
The young man’s face, as he sipped his cocktail, was a little drawn and anxious.
4
His Uncle Fred’s theory that. Horace Davenport, scientifically worked, would develop pay gold had impressed Pongo Twistleton a good deal both when he heard it and during the remainder of the day. Throughout the drive back to London it kept him in optimistic mood. But w
hen he woke on the following morning the idea struck him as unsound and impractical.
It was hopeless, he felt, to expect to mace any one given person for a sum like two hundred pounds. The only possible solution of his financial worries was to open a subscription list and let the general public in on the thing. He decided to look in at the Drones immediately and test the sentiment of the investors. And having arrived there, he was gratified to note that all the indications seemed to point to a successful flotation.
The atmosphere in the smoking-room of the Drones Club on the return of its members from their annual weekend at Le Touquet was not always one of cheerfulness and gaiety — there had been years when you might have mistaken the place for the Wailing Wall of Jerusalem — but today a delightful spirit of happiness prevailed. The dingy gods who preside over the chemin-de-fer tables at Continental Casinos had, it appeared, been extraordinarily kind to many of the Eggs, Beans and Crumpets revelling at the bar. And Pongo, drinking in the tales of their exploits, had just decided to raise the assessment of several of those present another ten pounds, when through the haze of cigarette smoke he caught sight of a familiar face. On a chair at the far end of the room sat Claude Pott.
It was not merely curiosity as to what Mr Pott was doing there or a fear lest he might be feeling lonely in these unaccustomed surroundings that caused Pongo to go and engage him in conversation. At the sight of the private investigator, there had floated into his mind like drifting thistledown the thought that it might be possible to start the ball rolling by obtaining a small donation from him. He crossed the room with outstretched hand.
‘Why, hullo, Mr Pott. What brings you here?’
‘Good morning, sir. I came with Mr Davenport. He is at the moment in the telephone booth, telephoning.’
‘I didn’t know old Horace ever got up as early as this.’
‘He has not retired to bed yet. He went to a dance last night.’
‘Of course, yes. The Bohemian Ball at the Albert Hall. I remember. Well, it’s nice seeing you again, Mr Pott. You left a bit hurriedly that time we met.’
‘Yes,’ said Claude Pott meditatively. ‘How did you come out with The Subject?’
‘Not too well. She threw her weight about a bit.’
‘I had an idea she would.’
‘You were better away.’
‘That’s what I thought.’
‘Still,’ said Pongo heartily, ‘I was very sorry you had to go, very. I could see that we were a couple of chaps who were going to get along together. Will you have a drink or something?’
‘No, thank you, Mr T.’
‘A cigarette or something?’
‘No, thank you.’
‘A chair or something? Oh, you’ve got one. I say, Mr Pott,’ said Pongo, ‘I was wondering —’
The babble at the bar had risen to a sudden crescendo. Oofy Prosser, the club’s tame millionaire, was repeating for the benefit of some new arrivals the story of how he had run his bank seven times, and there had come into Mr Pott’s eyes a dull glow, like the phosphorescent gleam on the stomach of a dead fish.
‘Coo!’ he said, directing at Oofy the sort of look a thoughtful vulture in the Sahara casts at a dying camel. ‘Seems to be a lot of money in here this morning.’
‘Yes. And talking of money —’
‘Now would be just the time to run the old Hat Stakes.’
‘Hat Stakes?’
‘Haven’t you ever heard of the Hat Stakes? It sometimes seems to me they don’t teach you boys nothing at your public schools. Here’s the way it works. You take somebody, as it might be me, and he opens a book on the Hat Race, the finish to be wherever you like — call it that door over there. See what I mean? The punters would bet on what sort of hat the first bloke coming in through that door would be wearing. You, for instance, might feel like having a tenner —’
Pongo flicked a speck of dust from his companion’s sleeve.
‘Ah, but I haven’t got a tenner,’ he said. ‘And that’s precisely why I was saying that I wondered —’
‘— on Top Hat. Then if a feller wearing a top hat was the first to come in, you’d cop.’
‘Yes, I see the idea. Amusing. Ingenious.’
‘But you can’t play the Hat Stakes nowadays, with everybody wearing these Homburgs. There wouldn’t be enough starters. Cor!’
‘Cor!’ agreed Pongo sympathetically. ‘You’d have to make it clothes or something, what? But you were speaking of tenners, and while on that subject…. Stop me if you’ve heard this before….’
Claude Pott, who had seemed about to sink into a brooding reverie, came out of his meditations with a start.
‘What’s that you said?’
‘I was saying that while on the subject of tenners —’
‘Clothes!’ Mr Pott rose from his chair with a spasmodic leap, as if he had seen The Subject entering the room. ‘Well, strike me pink!’
He shot for the door at a speed quite remarkable in a man of his build. A few moments later, he shot back again, and suddenly the Eggs, Beans and Crumpets assembled at the bar were shocked to discover that some bounder, contrary to all club etiquette, was making a speech.
‘Gentlemen!’
The babble died away, to be succeeded by a stunned silence, through which there came the voice of Claude Pott, speaking with all the fervour and brio of his Silver Ring days.
‘Gentlemen and sportsmen, if I may claim your kind indulgence for one instant! Gentlemen and sportsmen, I know gentlemen and sportsmen when I see them, and what I have been privileged to overhear of your conversation since entering this room has shown me that you are all gentlemen and sportsmen who are ready at all times to take part in a little sporting flutter.’
The words ‘sporting flutter’ were words which never failed to touch a chord in the members of the Drones Club. Something resembling warmth and sympathy began to creep into the atmosphere of cold disapproval. How this little blister had managed to worm his way into their smoking-room they were still at a loss to understand, but the initial impulse of those present to bung him out on his ear had softened into a more friendly desire to hear what he had to say.
‘Pott is my name, gentlemen — a name at one time, I venture to assert, not unfamiliar to patrons of the sport of kings, and though I have retired from active business as a turf commission agent I am still willing to make a little book from time to time to entertain sportsmen and gentlemen, and there’s no time like the present. Here we all are — you with the money, me with the book — so I say again, gentlemen, let’s have a little flutter. Gentlemen all, the Clothes Stakes are about to be run.’
Few members of the Drones are at their brightest and alertest in the morning. There was a puzzled murmur. A Bean said, ‘What did he say?’ and a Crumpet whispered, ‘The what Stakes?’
‘I was explaining the how-you-do-it of the Hat Stakes to my friend Mr Twistleton over there, and the Clothes Stakes are run on precisely the same principle. There is at the present moment a gentleman in the telephone booth along the corridor, and I have just taken the precaution to instruct a page-boy to shove a wedge under the door, thus ensuring that he will remain there and so accord you all ample leisure in which to place your wagers. Coo!’ said Claude Pott, struck by an unpleasant idea. ‘Nobody’s going to come along and let him out, are they?’
‘Of course not!’ cried his audience indignantly. The thought of anybody wantonly releasing a fellow member who had got stuck in the telephone booth, a thing that only happened once in a blue moon, was revolting to them.
‘Then that’s all right. Now then, gentlemen, the simple question you have to ask yourselves is — What is the gentleman in the telephone booth wearing? Or putting it another way — What’s he got on? Hence the term Clothes Stakes. It might be one thing, or it might be another. He might be in his Sunday-go-to-meetings, or he might have been taking a dip in the Serpentine and be in his little bathing suit. Or he may have joined the Salvation Army. To give you a lead, I am of
fering nine to four against Blue Serge, four to one Pin-Striped Grey Tweed, ten to one Golf Coat and Plus Fours, a hundred to six Gymnasium Vest and Running Shorts, twenty to one Court Dress as worn at Buckingham Palace, nine to four the field. And perhaps you, sir,’ said Mr Pott, addressing an adjacent Egg, ‘would be good enough to officiate as my clerk.’
‘That doesn’t mean I can’t have a bit on?’
‘By no means, sir. Follow the dictates of your heart and fear nothing.’
‘What are you giving Herringbone Cheviot Lounge?’
‘Six to one Herringbone Cheviot Lounge, sir.’
‘I’ll have ten bob.’
‘Right, sir. Six halves Herringbone Cheviot Lounge. Ready money, if you please sir. It’s not that I don’t trust you, but I’m not allowed by law. Thank you, sir. Walk up, walk up, my noble sportsmen. Nine to four the field.’
The lead thus given them removed the last inhibitions of the company. Business became brisk, and it was not long before Mr Pott had vanished completely behind a mass of eager punters.
Among the first to invest had been Pongo Twistleton. Hastening to the hall porter’s desk, he had written a cheque for his last ten pounds in the world, and he was now leaning against the bar, filled with the quiet satisfaction of the man who has spotted the winner and got his money down in good time.
For from the very inception of these proceedings it had been clear to Pongo that Fortune, hitherto capricious, had at last decided that it was no use trying to keep a good man down and had handed him something on a plate. To be a successful punter, what you need is information, and this he possessed in abundant measure. Alone of those present, he was aware of the identity of the gentleman in the telephone booth, and he had the additional advantage of knowing the inside facts about the latter’s wardrobe.
You take a chap like — say — Catsmeat Potter-Pirbright, that modern Brummel, and you might guess for hours without hitting on the precise suit he would be wearing on any given morning. But with Horace Pendlebury-Davenport it was different. Horace had never been a vivacious dresser. He liked to stick to the old and tried till they came apart on him, and it was this idiosyncrasy of his which had caused his recent fiancée, just before her departure for Le Touquet, to take a drastic step.