At any rate, he was the only relief in sight, so I rang up his office; and, finding that he would be at the Lewes Races next day, I took an early train there.
Well, Corky, I might have known. It stands to reason that, if a man has a spark of human feeling in his bosom, he does not become a bookie. I stood beside this bloke, Joe the Lawyer, from the start of the two o’clock race to the finish of the four-thirty, watching him rake in huge sums from mugs of every description until his satchel was simply bursting with cash; but when I asked him for the loan of a measly fifty pounds he didn’t even begin to look like parting.
You cannot fathom the psychology of these blighters, Corky. If you will believe me, the chief reason why he would not lend me this paltry sum appeared to be a fear of what people would say if they heard about it.
“Lend you fifty quid?” he said, in a sort of stunned way. “Who, me? Silly I’d look, wouldn’t I, lending you fifty quid!”
“But you don’t mind looking silly.”
“Having all the boys saying I was a softhearted fool.”
“A man of your stamp doesn’t care what fellows like that say,” I urged. “You’re too big. You can afford to despise them.”
“Well, I can’t afford to lend any fifty quids. I’d never hear the last of it.”
I simply can’t understand this terror of public opinion. Morbid, I call it. I told him I would keep the thing a dead secret—and, if he thought it safer, not even give him a line in writing to acknowledge the debt; but no, there was no tempting him.
“I’ll tell you what I will do,” he said.
“Twenty quid?”
“No, not twenty quid. Nor ten quid, either. Nor five quid. Nor one quid. But I’ll give you a lift back as far as Sandown in my car tomorrow, that’s what I’ll do.”
From the way he spoke, you would have thought he was doing me the best turn one man had ever done another. I was strongly inclined to reject his offer with contempt. The only thing that decided me to accept was the thought that, if he had as good a day at Sandown as he had had at Lewes, his better nature might after all assert itself even at the eleventh hour. I mean to say, even a bookie must have a melting mood occasionally; and if one came to Joe the Lawyer I wanted to be on the spot.
“Start from here at eleven sharp. If you aren’t ready, I’ll go without you.”
This conversation, Corky, had taken place in the saloon bar of the Coach and Horses at Lewes; and, having said these few words, the bloke Joe popped off. I stayed on to have one more, feeling the need of it after the breakdown of the business negotiations; and the fellow behind the bar got chatty.
“That was Joe the Lawyer just went out, wasn’t it?” he said. He chuckled. “He’s wide, that man is.”
I wasn’t much in the mood to pass the time discussing a fellow who wouldn’t let an old business friend have an insignificant sum like fifty quid, so I just nodded.
“Heard the latest about him?”
“No.”
“He’s wide, Joe is. He had a dog that was entered for the Waterloo Cup, and it died.”
“I know.”
“Well, I bet you don’t know what he did. Some of the lads were in here just now, talking about it. He raffled that dog.”
“How do you mean, raffled it?”
“Put it up for a raffle at twenty pounds a ticket.”
“But it was dead.”
“Certainly it was dead. But he didn’t tell them that. That’s where he was wide.”
“But how could he raffle a dead dog?”
“Why couldn’t he raffle a dead dog? Nobody knew it was dead.”
“How about the man who drew the winning ticket?”
“Ah! Well, he had to tell him, of course. He just handed him his money back. And there he was, a couple of hundred quid in hand. He’s wide, Joe is.”
Have you ever experienced, Corky, that horrible sensation of having all your ideals totter and melt away, leaving you in a world of hideous blackness where it seems impossible to trust your fellow-man an inch? What do you mean, my aunt must often have felt that way? I resent these slurs, Corky. Whenever I have had occasion to pinch anything from my aunt, it has always been with the most scrupulous motives, with the object of collecting a little ready cash in order to lay the foundations of a vast fortune.
This was an entirely different matter. This fiend in human shape had had no thought but of self. Not content with getting fifty quid out of me and sticking to it like glue, he had deliberately tricked me into accepting five pounds for all rights in a dead dog which he knew was shortly about to bring him in a couple of hundred. Was it fair? Was it just?
And the terrible part of the whole thing was that there seemed nothing that I could do about it. I couldn’t even reproach him. At least, I could—but a fat lot of help that would have been. All I could do was to save my train-fare home by accepting a lift in his car.
I am bound to say, Corky—and this will show you how a man’s moral outlook may deteriorate through contact with fellows of this stamp—I am
