Читать книгу Autobiography of a Cad - A. G. Macdonell - Страница 7

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My last year at Eton was a happy one, marred only by a long warfare by letter with Father’s younger brother, Uncle Arthur. The casus belli was a codicil to Father’s will in which he had appointed Uncle Arthur as my trustee until I was twenty-one. Father had, however, very luckily forgotten to get his signature to the codicil witnessed, and I was perfectly justified in using this flaw to repudiate Uncle Arthur’s claims to authority over me. Arthur, a foolish fellow anyway, greatly interested in what are called for some reason “good works,” asked me over and over again not to take a stand on a trivial technicality, as he always described it in his boring letters. In the end I grew tired of answering his appeals and I wrote to him a stiffish letter, pointing out that I was now head of the family, that at last an opportunity had arrived to lift the family out of its bourgeois antecedents, and that I proposed to do so forthwith. I said that by way of a first step in this direction I intended to have nothing more to do with him and his family, and that all future correspondence about the ridiculous codicil would be answered by my lawyers and that their bill of costs would be sent to him for settlement. I re-read this letter before posting it and, thinking that it was perhaps a little harsh, added a postscript in which I offered to defray the cost of the education of my two cousins, Martin and Edgar, his sons, on condition that they were sent to a school for gentlemen. Uncle Arthur was not courteous enough even to answer this postscript, but for a long time he wrangled with my lawyers. It did not matter to me, and it cost him, together with the expenses of the writ that we had to serve on him, a matter of fifty pounds. In fact the only ones who really suffered from the whole farce were Martin and Edgar, who were sent instead to Harrow.

But with this exception my last year at Eton passed quite pleasantly. I had a great deal of money, which is nice anywhere but especially nice at Eton, and I was able to entertain lavishly during the holidays. The difference between being the son of a simple, Radical bourgeois who is alive, and being the inheritor of a simple, Radical bourgeois who is dead, is pretty considerable. From nothing I had become in one moment the young Squire of Grantly Puerorum, rich, popular, and independent.

The first and incomparably the greatest advantage to be gained by attending an educational establishment such as Eton, is the acquisition of friends. Scholarship cannot be forced upon those who are unfitted to receive it, nor can it be denied to those who are naturally endowed with a passionate capacity to acquire it. A love of games, the second gift of the public school to the embryonic Empire-builder, is all very fine for the muddied oafs but there are many men who in early life repudiate the suggestion that they are oafs and have a sensitive distaste for mud. For these a straight bat is as repugnant as a clean slate, because both imply a submission to an artificial discipline.

My particular friends during my last year at Eton were Lord Plaistow, Le Comte de St. Etienne-de-la-Fosse, Lord Bletchley, Eddie Duncatton, whose father was chairman of the Pacific Insurance Company, and Charles Hudson, the heir to the American Zinc fortune. We were all of the same year, and shared a taste for the elegances of life and a distaste for cricket, schoolmasters (whom Eddie once described as men amongst boys and boys amongst men), and the lower classes.

We also were alike in taking an interest in the fair sex, although it was not until we went to Oxford in the following year that we fully realized what an admirable form of entertainment the fair sex can be.

Our life was altogether delightful during that last year. We were all rich, we were all old for our years, we had all escaped that dreadful period in the lives of most young men when their faces are covered with red spots, and half the drawing-rooms of Mayfair were open to us during the holidays and Long Leave. Our influence in the school was always thrown in upon the side of normal common-sense and rational conduct, and we made an especial point of beating severely and frequently all those younger boys who took an excessive interest in anything, whether it was work, games, literature, housemaids, archaeology, or science. We also dealt ruthlessly with all vulgarians, such as the sons of nouveaux riches, or snobs, or the occasional offspring of a country parsonage whose education was being paid for by some Lord or Lady Bountiful. In short, our idea was to create a wholesome tradition of respect for the right kind of authority, coupled with a sense of proportion which should discourage middle-class enthusiasms. We were not popular with the masters, but we had never expected to be. They caused us infinite amusement.

But pleasant though Eton was for men of our qualities and position, we were glad to move on to the University. One gets tired even of beating bourgeois posteriors. Bletchley and Duncatton had been originally designed by their parents for Cambridge, but we decided to stick together, and in October 1908 we all went up to Oxford. In the same term I sent George Bedford up to Oxford to study agriculture as a non-collegiate student.

The careers of myself and my friends at the University moved along a predestined course to an abrupt predestined end. Any reasonably intelligent man who had a knowledge of our high-spirited, restless, eagerly-enquiring, impatient minds, could have foretold the sequence of our joint careers to a hair’s-breadth. Academic honours were not for us, nor were the tedious restraints of academic life. The monastic discipline at Eton—for we had, from the very beginning of our time there, scrupulously accepted de-la-Fosse’s dictum that a man to whom femininity does not appeal is lower than the beasts of the field—together with the occasional glimpses into a strange and beautiful new world which we had enjoyed during our last two or three holidays, combined to unleash us upon the stage-doors and tobacconists’ shops of the University City like a sextet of young wolves. Life was an incessant whirl of excitement. We were continually being pursued by proctors, fined and gated by the college authorities, and harried by indignant fathers. But we did not care two straws for any of them. We were young and handsome and hot-blooded, and the world was at our feet.

There were a few unfortunate incidents, of course. Such things are bound to happen when life is being lived at high pressure. But the quarrel between de-la-Fosse and Plaistow was sad, because it is always sad when old friends fall out. I do not know whether it is that I have an especial genius for friendship, but few things have distressed me more in my life than the defection of a man whom I have loved and trusted. Both de-la-Fosse and Plaistow felt that the other had betrayed him, and it certainly was true that neither of them came very well out of the episode, for both of them lost their tempers in a very common way. Indeed, I got rather a shock over the whole business, because it had never occurred to me that two aristocrats, of the genuine old aristocracy of Europe, could descend so miserably into the gutter. For de-la-Fosse came of a stock which had ruled in Touraine for centuries, and Plaistow’s forebears had sold vegetables to Edward the Fourth.

The quarrel arose out of the legendary glamour which surrounds, in the eyes of the women of every civilized country in the world, a French nobleman. St. Etienne-de-la-Fosse, an exquisite product of hundreds of cultured years, found no difficulty whatsoever in seducing a very attractive young girl who, as everybody knew, was being far-sightedly groomed by Bill Plaistow for his second year. She was very lovely and very young, and Bill, being essentially an artist, had heroically resolved not to pluck the fruit before it was ripe. So he was preparing her, gently, smoothly, and on cosmopolitan lines, for the ultimate sacrifice upon the masculine altar. I well remember Bill’s rage when he discovered that all his preliminary work had gone for nothing. He used very harsh words about St. Etienne and went about for days swearing vengeance against the treacherous frog who had forestalled him with the fair Melinda. I brought them together in the end, and at a small champagne party in my rooms I persuaded them to shake hands. But they did not mean it. They were sworn enemies for life. For me the whole episode was tragic because it was meaningless, and so it was faintly comic. Two old and trusted friends were quarrelling over the virginity of a sweet but stupid girl in a provincial town. What else could I do but smile, because if the gallant Frenchman had forestalled Bill with Melinda, I myself had forestalled the gallant Frenchman? But naturally I could not tell them that. After all, a gentleman’s son does not say these things about a woman’s honour. Besides, there was Melinda’s baby, and it was obviously more judicious to allow St. Etienne to accept the responsibility, and the paternity order, rather than admit my own delectable priority. And by the time that the youngster was old enough to resemble anything but a carrot, we had all left the University. This was, perhaps, fortunate, for I received a very angry letter from St. Etienne some years later. He had paid a visit to Melinda for the first time since going down from Oxford, to discuss financial arrangements with Melinda’s father, and had instantly spotted the resemblance which the child bore to its father. A scientist once told me that the children of particularly masculine men are apt to resemble their fathers more closely than the children of others. This is a drawback for us, but it has the compensation that at least we can take satisfaction from our powers. St. Etienne, in between his rambling sentences of abuse, made repeated demands for the repayment of all the money which he had paid out on the paternity order, but, as I explained in my reply, nothing could be proved and he could whistle for his money. I lost St. Etienne’s friendship, it is true. But I had carefully weighed the value of it before I made my decision, and it was with the most careful deliberation that I chose to sacrifice St. Etienne rather than pay the twelve hundred and forty pounds which he had disbursed for the child. No Frenchman, with whatever exquisite charm he may be endowed, is worth all that amount of money. Besides, he had been paying too much, as I pointed out. I also added that if he had had a tenth of my brains he would have passed the brat on to Bill Plaistow. Incidentally, it just shows how wise my decision was to prefer twelve hundred and forty pounds to St. Etienne’s friendship—dearly though I loved him—for the war broke out a few weeks after his second threatening letter reached me, together with a strange document from a Notaire Publique in Limoges which appeared to correspond to what we know as a solicitor’s letter, and he had to join his regiment of French artillery and was killed almost at once near Compiègne. It was a lucky circumstance for me.

Years later our College at Oxford put up a memorial to him, and I subscribed rather handsomely to the list. This was only right and proper. I was grateful to St. Etienne-de-la-Fosse for having enriched my life with his friendship, and I was also glad that he had been translated to the Valhalla of those who have died for their country on the field of honour before his rascally attorney in Limoges managed to serve a writ on me.

I have related this incident for no other purpose than to point out the ancient moral that women can play hell with the lives of strong and decent men. There we were—three exceptional men. And a little tradesman’s daughter, a worthless creature, entered into our lives with no other contribution to the world’s gaiety except beautiful ankles and a certain wanton charm, and smashed up two friendships. Dear Melinda. She was soft and silly and she gave me one of the best laughs of my life when I sat as arbiter between St. Etienne and Bill when they furiously claimed priority as deflowerers (or is the word deflorists?). But all the same it is queer that three such men, with an unusual power to control their surroundings and mould their lives, should have been influenced by such a creature.

It occurs to me to wonder where the child is now. It is the first time in my recollection that I have wondered that. It does not matter anyway.

By an extraordinary sequence of good fortune, coupled with the exercise of social influence and personal charm, we survived a whole year at Oxford. But it was clear to the world that the pace could not last. A smash was inevitable. It came in the beginning of our second year, on my twentieth birthday.

By this time I had passed through—if, indeed, I had even been in—the callow stages of weediness in appearance and floppiness in mind which normally afflict the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth years of a young man’s life, and I was sturdy, healthy, and—to make no bones about it—good-looking. The only handicap which I possessed was my comparative lack of inches, for I was barely five-foot-ten. This may be considered by most people to be a very fair height, but it always irked me in the presence of the six-footers who abound in the ballrooms and drawing-rooms of our aristocratic circles. It was, I know, absurd for anyone of my other advantages to feel this malaise, but, however hard I have tried to get rid of it, and with whatever extra touch of self-confidence I have garnished my demeanour, the malaise has remained all through my life. It was all the more absurd as I grew older and as each succeeding year proved with the best of all practical proofs that women are not swayed in their attachments by mere brawn. A silver tongue and seventy inches can give an hour’s start to a booby with seventy-five, and still win in a canter. But even this knowledge, consoling though it was, never quite dissipated my resentment that such an otherwise admirable piece of work should have been marred for a ha’porth of millimetres.

It is not that one is afraid of physical violence from the bigger man. In our walk of life the use of fists is taboo, and even at Oxford where an occasional outsider had forced himself into colleges that ought in common decency to have been reserved for his betters, the danger of becoming involved in a brawl was slight. During my time I only remember to have taken part in one. This was when a party of us were surprised by the occupant of a set of rooms in the act of wrecking them. We had thought that he would not return until later. He was a big, coarse brute of a youth named Stukeley, whose father, we had ascertained, actually kept a public-house near Newmarket, and although there were six of us he did not hesitate to attack us single-handed when his slow mind had grasped the connection between our presence in his rooms and the scene of havoc. It was an unpleasant affair, and such was Stukeley’s strength and dexterity that it might have gone hardly with us if I had not used strategy and, grasping one of his ankles from the post of vantage under the table which I had secured at the outbreak of hostilities, brought him down with a crash. We learnt one lesson from this episode and never again wrecked anyone’s rooms unless we could muster a wrecking party of at least eight. But this was the only occasion on which I was in danger of physical violence from a bigger man than myself. For the episode of Cyril Hereward, whose pale, pasty face annoyed me so much one winter’s afternoon when I came upon it suddenly round a corner in college that I gave it a good slash with my riding-crop—I had been out hunting—was different. There were those who blamed me for the action, as Hereward stood six-foot-four in his horrid grey woollen socks, and they considered that I had been foolhardy. But I knew that there was no danger, as the fellow was a poet and a disciple of Tolstoy. The only blame that might attach to me over the affair was that I had acted impulsively without waiting to consider the pros and cons of such an action in the judicial way in which I have almost invariably acted through life. But the answer to that argument is that Hereward’s face was a standing temptation to anyone who happened to have a riding-crop in his hand, and that my sudden impulse was as right as a judicial choice would have been.

I mention this apparently trivial affair because of the consequences which followed from it and which afforded one of many examples of my talent in circumventing ill-fortune. A petty incident which, with anyone else but me, would have been completely forgotten in a couple of minutes, returned to dog me years later, and it was only by great exertions on my part that it did not engulf me in catastrophe.

On my twentieth birthday, then, I was a well-set-up, fairly tall, broad-shouldered young man with white teeth, black hair, neat black moustache, greenish brown eyes, and well-shaped hands and feet, and it was with some reasonable satisfaction that I sat at the end of the dinner-table in my rooms and listened to the speeches of my guests in praise of their host. For I was giving a small party to celebrate the occasion. I see from the autographed menu which lies before me as I write that nine of us sat down that evening. There were my five Etonian friends, of course, and three others, namely: Gerald Chippenham, whose father was high in the Conservative world and who had run up some pretty stiff debts in Oxford, a pair of facts which might seem disconnected but are not; Hugo Walsh-Aynscot, brother of a very beautiful sister; and Kennerly Van Suidam, the only Rhodes Scholar of the year who had the entrée into the most exclusive society in the world, the Newport yachting crowd in America.

As I leant back in my chair and twirled my brandy-glass, and listened to Walsh-Aynscot’s eulogy, I remember that I fell to wondering which of all these delightful men was the one I loved the best. To which was I the most deeply devoted? It was a difficult choice. My Etonian friends were of longer standing than the three others, but then their little faults and foibles were correspondingly familiar and were becoming increasingly irritating. Bill Plaistow, for instance, was beginning to bet fairly heavily and, as his efforts to beat the book were seldom crowned with success, he was developing the habit of coming to me for loans. Not only that, but he cut up very nasty indeed when, on the fourth request, I told him that I would go through fire for a pal—everybody knew that—but that I wasn’t going to lend him any more.

“Then I’m not your pal?” he asked angrily. I assured him that most certainly he was still my pal, but not to the tune of a cool monkey.

“To the tune of a hundred, then?” he demanded, and I was forced to tell him that one does not assess one’s friendships in terms of money. Natural delicacy for his feelings prevented me from adding that his present course of behaviour, heading straight downhill as it was, made it exceedingly unlikely that he would develop in the future into the useful friend which I had hoped for, and on the expectation of which I had wasted so much time and money. Is not Hugo Walsh-Aynscot an even dearer fellow than dear Bill, I mused as his glowing speech went on and on? Ruth Walsh-Aynscot is a very, very beautiful girl, with whom I would like to be more intimate. Yes, Hugo is a dear fellow, and when I visit Winterley End, his father’s place, in the vac, it will be strange, I thought, if a girl with such full, red lips resists, or wants to resist, a silver tongue. Needless to add that these musings were not in any way interrupted by thoughts of the marriage ceremony. There would be plenty of time for that sort of thing later on, and not necessarily with any of the first few Ruths, so to speak, who might happen to fall by the wayside. Now Van Suidam is speaking,—how it all comes back to me across the mists of years— ... dear old Ken ... such a good chap ... and there has always been a queer fascination about Newport.... I am not sure that Kennerly isn’t the best of them all ... though his accent is deplorable and his manners are sadly old-fashioned, and his dinner-jacket is quite terrible.... Chippenham—how strangely the memory works. It is more than a quarter of a century since Jerry Chippenham made his speech, yet I can recall my thoughts as if it was yesterday. Debts and an influential father—that was the theme. Get Jerry out of his hole, on the strictest condition that old Chippenham should not be told, and then let the news filter round to old Chippenham by a circuitous route, and then what about a safe seat in the safe old Tory districts? And there sits dear old Hudson ... heir to American Zinc ... splendid fellow ... and Bletchley ... bound to end up as a Governor-General.... Eddie Duncatton ... de-la-Fosse ... useful fellows both.... I loved them all, and they, I think, were pretty fond of me.

The last speech was made, the last toast drunk, the last magnum of Armagnac circulated, and then we trooped off gaily to wreck the rooms of the Senior Tutor, who was visiting a sick friend in London. We made a very complete and capital job of it. Seldom indeed can the venerable college have seen a more workmanlike piece of execution. We smashed everything that was smashable—that goes without saying—but we also added some neat new touches, such as pouring vermilion paint over the first editions, tearing the fly-leaves out of the autographed presentation copies of books, and signing fictitious names in indelible pencil across the water-colours and etchings which hung upon the walls. I am always proud to think that it fell to me to make the crowning suggestion—it was, after all, my birthday, and I was the centre of the party—and after a vigorous search through drawers and desks, we found the manuscript of the verse translation of Lucretius on which the Senior Tutor had been engaged for the last seventeen years. We gave it every chance and it was not until Walsh-Aynscot had declaimed the whole of the first hundred lines in his admirable baritone—his sister had a vibrating contralto that was not dissimilar—that we unanimously voted it to be complete bilge and burned it, leaf by leaf, in the quad., dancing round it and singing as much as we could remember of the hundred and twenty-second Psalm, which, as it was precious little, we eked out with some of St. Etienne’s barrack songs, learnt by him from conscripts in Epinal and taught to us on winter evenings.

It was not until we had consumed about four-fifths of the bulky manuscript in the flames that I perceived the imminent approach of authority. In the distance several dark figures were creeping towards us, taking every advantage of the shadowy buttresses of Chapel and the angles of the walls of the quadrangle and the numerous ill-lit doorways to mask their approach. It was obvious to me at a glance that their object was not so much to extinguish our bonfire as to identify us. A mad rush towards us across the open quad. would have given us warning and enabled us to scatter beyond hope of identification, and this stealthy approach was much more dangerous.

It was doubly characteristic of me that I should have been the only one of us who saw the advancing shadows and that I should have kept my head in the crisis. To have warned my companions and persuaded them to fly might have taken time. They were in that stubborn, unreasoning mood which adolescent intoxication so often induces, and while arguing with them for their own good I might easily have caused my own harm. Without a moment’s hesitation, therefore, I withdrew unobtrusively from the glare of the bonfire and retreated into the darkness. Once out of sight, it was the work of a few seconds to reach a well-known angle in the College wall where it was possible to effect an exit, or entry, and within five minutes I was knocking up George Bedford in his small but adequate lodgings in the town. The poor fellow was still toiling at his studies, dressed in a brown woollen dressing-gown and drinking cocoa, and he was delighted to see me. In a few words I explained that I wanted his word of honour, on the following day, that I had spent the last two hours in his rooms. At first he was inclined to demur, but when I reiterated my instructions and threw in a casual enquiry about whether his father enjoyed his position as my estate-agent, and gently asked him whether he himself was enjoying life at Oxford sufficiently to make him wish to remain up any longer, George quickly saw reason and engaged himself to furnish me with the required alibi. I then returned to College by the main entrance and duly had my name taken by the porter for coming in after the prescribed hours. The penalty would be, I knew, a “gating” and a fine. But whatever it was I felt that it would not be a greater penalty than that for wrecking the Senior Tutor’s rooms and burning the manuscript of his verse translation of Lucretius.

Nor was it.

Next morning my eight guests were sentenced to expulsion from the University and a fine of fifty pounds apiece, while I was fined ten shillings and gated for a week.

There was an interesting sequel to the episode which throws, I think, a good deal of light on the difference between my individualistic character on the one hand and the sort of stereotyped mass-character of my friends on the other.

While they were being tried, convicted, and sentenced by the College authorities, I hastened into the town and purchased three magnums of Bollinger 1900, which I brought back to my rooms and put on ice. It was pretty obvious that expulsion would inevitably be the sentence and I wished to entertain them for the last time before we parted.

Half an hour later, as I had confidently expected, my eight friends came marching up the stairs and entered my rooms. In a trice the first cork had popped and nine glasses were being filled.

But there was no gay shout of approval as the liquor foamed and sparkled into my lovely Venetian goblets. There was a dead, almost menacing silence. I looked up from my Ganymede labours and scanned the faces of my friends. I have always been an exceptionally shrewd reader of faces, and it did not take more than the briefest glance to detect in those eight darkened scowls something more than the natural vexation of men who have been sent down from their University. There was a very palpable air of hostility in their demeanour, and I made all possible speed to dispel it. Unluckily, although I had accurately diagnosed the temperature of the meeting, I did not at the first attempt diagnose the cause of the temperature, and I began: “Don’t look at me like that. I didn’t give information against you. I never said a word.”

From the babel of sound which can only emerge from the mouths of one angry Frenchman, two angry hundred-per-cent Americans, and five averagely stupid angry Englishmen, all trying to explain the same thing simultaneously and at the top of their voices, I got the impression that if I had given information against them they would have assassinated me there and then. Even in that hectic moment, when all one’s wits were necessary, there was time for the thought to flash through my mind that these men had a very queer notion of the meaning of the word friendship. They were saying things to me and using expressions to describe me which were quite incompatible with the spirit of David and Jonathan. But I shrugged my mental shoulders, so to speak. It is not to be expected that all of us should treat friendship with such an especial—possibly such an exaggerated—sanctity as some of us do. Perhaps we are wrong to do so, but there it is. We do, and we must be humoured.

Long before the babel of abuse and indignation had died down a clearer view of the position had unfolded itself and, for the second time within a handful of seconds, I had obtained a lamentable sidelight upon my friends’ ideas of friendship.

For the thing which was vexing them was not the ignoble thought that I might have turned King’s evidence against them—as if such a thing had been remotely possible for a man of my character; and in any case, as they might have seen, and as I had seen hours before when pondering over the matter in my mind, to have turned King’s evidence would have automatically ruined my alibi and landed poor little George Bedford in the cart for perjury. No. The thing which was enraging them was the fact that they were being sent down whereas I had escaped all penalty except a “gating” and a smallish fine.

This seemed to me at the time, and still seems to me after the long lapse of years, a singularly ungenerous attitude. Surely if they had been true friends, of the sort that I have all my life held before my eyes as the ideal of friendship, they would have rejoiced in my fortunate escape.

“We have sinned,” they would have said, “and we must pay the penalty for it. Justice is justice, and we accept our fate. But dear old Edward,” they would have gone on, “has escaped, and good luck to him.” They would have rejoiced in my success and would have thrown themselves with enthusiasm upon the Bollinger in their eagerness to drink to my good health and to my subsequent academic career.

But alas! for human nature. These were good chaps, but not quite so good as I had hoped. I had put them on a pinnacle from which they abruptly descended at the first opportunity, leaving me standing there alone. I looked from face to face in that flushed and angry semicircle. A very big decision had to be made, and made very very quickly. It was another crisis in my life. How clearly it all comes back to me—the chiming of the clock over the porter’s lodge, the merry chirping of the starlings under the Dean’s eaves, the cries of the undergraduates in the quadrangle, and the tinkle of the Merry Widow waltz upon a distant piano, and the puffings and snortings of the expelled octette.

I looked from face to face. Were they worth it? That was the whole essence of the decision I had to make. On the one side there was my academic career—I was certain to get my first in History—and on the other there was Chippenham’s father, that prominent Conservative, there was Plaistow’s position in the New Forest, there was van Suidam and the Vanderbilt yachting crowd, there was American Zinc, and there was de-la-Fosse’s château in Burgundy. I looked from face to face, and it is characteristic of me that I dismissed Walsh-Aynscot entirely from the balance of forces. Ruth was a lovely girl, but lovely girls are plentiful in this world and, in a matter of such importance, need not be reckoned for one moment. But Charlie Hudson would one day control American Zinc, and St. Etienne’s lineage marched with the Montmorencys and the Rohans, and Eddie Duncatton would be a very rich man when his father died, and Bletchley was related to half the nobility of England. Against all that, what did a ridiculous first in History matter? Besides, they were my friends. They might have been ready to let me down, but that was no justification for my letting them down. Those of us who have higher standards must keep to them, come what may. So, just as the tumult was about to break out again in real earnest, I raised my hand, silenced the incipient tempest, and informed them that I had already confessed to the authorities and had insisted on suffering the same penalties as the others.

After the cheering had died down and a tremendous toast had been drunk in Bollinger to the “Prince of Good Sportsmen,” my friends repaired to their respective rooms to make ready for their departure and I slipped off to make my confession to the Dean.

That evening we all went to London, dined at the Piccadilly Hotel, visited Our Miss Gibbs at the Gaiety, and sent round enormous baskets of orchids to Gertie Millar, Denise Orme, Maisie Gay, Kitty Mason, and Olive May, removed a policeman’s helmet in Shaftesbury Avenue, and ended up traditionally in the cells at Vine Street.

It was, in fact, such an exciting day that it did not occur to me for a long time that I had landed poor little George Bedford in for perjury after all. He was fined ten pounds, I discovered afterwards. I thought for a moment of paying him the money, but decided not to. He was sufficiently dependent on me as it was, without the addition of cash benefactions, and I dislike anything that resembles servility.