'The Vincent Jopp? The American multi-millionaire?'
'The same. You never knew he once came within an ace of winning the
American Amateur Championship, did you?'
'I never heard of his playing golf.'
'He played for one season. After that he gave it up and has not touched
a club since. Ring the bell and get me a small lime-juice, and I will
tell you all.'
* * * * *
It was long before your time (said the Oldest Member) that the events
which I am about to relate took place. I had just come down from
Cambridge, and was feeling particularly pleased with myself because I
had secured the job of private and confidential secretary to Vincent
Jopp, then a man in the early thirties, busy in laying the foundations
of his present remarkable fortune. He engaged me, and took me with him
to Chicago.
Jopp was, I think, the most extraordinary personality I have
encountered in a long and many-sided life. He was admirably equipped
for success in finance, having the steely eye and square jaw without
which it is hopeless for a man to enter that line of business. He
possessed also an overwhelming confidence in himself, and the ability
to switch a cigar from one corner of his mouth to the other without
wiggling his ears, which, as you know, is the stamp of the true Monarch
of the Money Market. He was the nearest approach to the financier on
the films, the fellow who makes his jaw-muscles jump when he is
telephoning, that I have ever seen.
Like all successful men, he was a man of method. He kept a pad on his
desk on which he would scribble down his appointments, and it was my
duty on entering the office each morning to take this pad and type its
contents neatly in a loose-leaved ledger. Usually, of course, these
entries referred to business appointments and deals which he was
contemplating, but one day I was interested to note, against the date
May 3rd, the entry:
'Propose to Amelia'
I was interested, as I say, but not surprised. Though a man of steel
and iron, there was nothing of the celibate about Vincent Jopp. He was
one of those men who marry early and often. On three separate occasions
before I joined his service he had jumped off the dock, to scramble
back to shore again later by means of the Divorce Court lifebelt.
Scattered here and there about the country there were three ex-Mrs.
Jopps, drawing their monthly envelope, and now, it seemed, he
contemplated the addition of a fourth to the platoon.
I was not surprised, I say, at this resolve of his. What did seem a
little remarkable to me was the thorough way in which he had thought
the thing out. This iron-willed man recked nothing of possible
obstacles. Under the date of June 1st was the entry:
'Marry Amelia';
while in March of the following year he had arranged to have his
first-born christened Thomas Reginald. Later on, the short-coating of
Thomas Reginald was arranged for, and there was a note about sending
him to school. Many hard things have been said of Vincent Jopp, but
