The Grey Wig: Stories and Novelettes

'I didn't stumble. Deliberate, intelligent selection. You see, it's the next best thing to Piccadilly. You just cross Waterloo Bridge, and there you are at the centre, five minutes from all the clubs. The natives have not yet risen to the idea.'

'You mean the rent,' laughed Peter. 'You're as canny and careful as a Scotch professor. I think it's simply grand the way you've beaten out those shillings, in defiance of your natural instincts. I should have melted them years ago. I believe you have got some musical genius after all.'

'You over-rate my abilities,' said Lancelot, with the whimsical expression that sometimes flashed across his face even in his most unamiable moments. 'You must deduct the thalers I made in exhibitions. As for living in cheap lodgings, I am not at all certain it's an economy, for every now and again it occurs to you that you are saving an awful lot, and you take a hansom on the strength of it.'

'Well, I haven't torn up that cheque yet-'

'Peter!' said Lancelot, his flash of gaiety dying away, 'I tell you these things as a friend, not as a beggar. If you look upon me as the second, I cease to be the first.'

'But, man, I owe you the money; and if it will enable you to hold out a little longer-why, in Heaven's name, shouldn't you-?'

'You don't owe me the money at all; I made no bargain with you; I am not a moneylender.'

'Pack dick sum Henker!' growled Peter, with a comical grimace. 'Was fuer a casuist! What a swindler you'd make! I wonder you have the face to deny the debt. Well, and how did you leave Frau Sauer-Kraut?' he said, deeming it prudent to sheer off the subject.

'Fat as a Christmas turkey.'

'Or a German sausage. The extraordinary things that woman stuffed herself with!-chunks of fat, stewed apples, Kartoffel salad-all mixed up in one plate, as in a dustbin.'

'Don't! You make my gorge rise. Ach Himmel! to think that this nation should be musical! O Music, heavenly maid, how much garlic I have endured for thy sake!'

'Ha! ha! ha!' laughed Peter, putting down his whisky that he might throw himself freely back in the easy chair and roar.

'O that garlic!' he said, panting. 'No wonder they smoked so much in Leipsic. Even so they couldn't keep the reek out of the staircases. Still, it's a great country is Germany. Our house does a tremendous business in German patents.'

'A great country? A land of barbarians rather. How can a people be civilised that eats jam with its meat?'

'Bravo, Lancelot! You're in lovely form to-night. You seem to go a hundred miles out of your way to come the truly British. First it was oil-now it's jam. There was that aristocratic flash in your eye, too, that look of supreme disdain which brings on riots in Trafalgar Square. Behind the patriotic, the national note, 'How can a people be civilised that eats jam with its meat?' I heard the deeper, the oligarchic accent, 'How can a people be enfranchised that eats meat with its fingers?' Ah, you are right! How you do hate the poor! What bores they are! You aristocrats-the products of centuries of culture, comfort, and cocksureness-will never rid yourselves of your conviction that you are the backbone of England-no, not though that backbone were picked clean of every scrap of flesh by the rats of Radicalism.'

'What in the devil are you talking about now?' demanded Lancelot. 'You seem to me to go a hundred miles out of your way to twit me with my poverty and my breeding. One would almost think you were anxious to convince me of the poverty of your breeding.'

'Oh, a thousand pardons!' ejaculated Peter, blushing violently. 'But good heavens, old chap! There's your hot temper again. You surely wouldn't suspect me, of all people in the world, of meaning anything personal? I'm talking of you as a class. Contempt is in your blood-and quite right! We're such snobs, we deserve it. Why d'ye think I ever took to you as a boy at school? Was it because you scribbled inaccurate sonatas and I had myself a talent for knocking tunes off the piano? Not a bit of it. I thought it was, perhaps, but that was only one of my many youthful errors. No, I liked you because your father was an old English baronet, and mine was a merchant who trafficked mainly in things Teutonic. And that's why I like you still. 'Pon my soul it is. You gratify my historic sense-like an old building. You are picturesque. You stand to me for all the good old ideals-including the pride which we are beginning to see is deuced unchristian. Mind you, it's a curious kind of pride when one looks into it. Apparently it's based on the fact that your family has lived on the nation for generations. And yet you won't take my cheque-which is your own. Now don't swear-I know one mustn't analyse things, or the world would come to pieces, so I always vote Tory.'

'Then I shall have to turn Radical,' grumbled Lancelot.

'Certainly you will, when you have had a little more experience of poverty,' retorted Peter. 'There, there, old man! forgive me. I only do it to annoy you. Fact is, your outbursts of temper attract me. They are pleasant to look back upon when the storm is over. Yes, my dear Lancelot, you are like the king you look-you can do no wrong. You are picturesque. Pass the whisky.'

Lancelot smiled, his handsome brow serene once more. He murmured, 'Don't talk rot,' but inwardly he was not displeased at Peter's allegiance, half mocking though he knew it.

'Therefore, my dear chap,' resumed Peter, sipping his whisky and water, 'to return to our lambs, I bow to your patrician prejudices in favour of forks. But your patriotic prejudices are on a different level. There, I am on the same ground as you, and I vow I see nothing inherently superior in the British combination of beef and beetroot, to the German amalgam of lamb and jam.'

'Damn lamb and jam!' burst forth Lancelot, adding, with his whimsical look: 'There's rhyme, as well as reason. How on earth did we get on this tack?'

'I don't know,' said Peter, smiling. 'We were talking about Frau Sauer-Kraut, I think. And did you board with her all the time?'

'Yes, and I was always hungry. Till the last, I never learnt to stomach her mixtures. But it was really too much trouble to go down the ninety stairs to a restaurant. It was much easier to be hungry.'

'And did you ever get a reform in the hours of washing the floor?'

'Ha! ha! ha! No, they always waited till I was going to bed. I suppose they thought I liked damp. They never got over my morning tub, you know. And that, too, sprang a leak after you left, and helped spontaneously to wash the floor.'

'Shows the fallacy of cleanliness,' said Peter, 'and the inferiority of British ideals. They never bathed in their lives, yet they looked the pink of health.'

'Yes,-their complexion was high,-like the fish.'

'Ha! ha! Yes, the fish! That was a great luxury, I remember. About once a month.'

'Of course, the town is so inland,' said Lancelot.

'I see-it took such a long time coming. Ha! ha! ha! And the Herr Professor-is he still a bachelor?'

As the Herr Professor was a septuagenarian and a misogamist, even in Peter's time, his question tickled Lancelot. Altogether the two young men grew quite jolly, recalling a hundred oddities, and reknitting their friendship at the expense of the Fatherland.

'But was there ever a more madcap expedition than ours?' exclaimed Peter. 'Most boys start out to be pirates-'

'And some do become music-publishers,' Lancelot finished grimly, suddenly reminded of a grievance.

'Ha! ha! ha! Poor fellow!' laughed Peter. 'Then you have found them out already.'

'Does any one ever find them in?' flashed Lancelot. 'I suppose they do exist and are occasionally seen of mortal eyes. I suppose wives and friends and mothers gaze on them with no sense of special privilege, unconscious of their invisibility to the profane eyes of mere musicians.'

'My dear fellow, the mere musicians are as plentiful as niggers on the sea-shore. A publisher might spend his whole day receiving regiments of unappreciated geniuses. Bond Street would be impassable. You look at the publisher too much from your own standpoint.'

'I tell you I don't look at him from any standpoint. That's what I complain of. He's encircled with a prickly hedge of clerks. 'You will hear from us.' 'It shall have our best consideration. We have no knowledge of the Ms. in question.' Yes, Peter, two valuable quartets have I lost, messing about with these villains.'

'I tell you what. I'll give you an introduction to Brahmson. I know him-privately.'

'No, thank you, Peter.'