Читать книгу Edgar Wallace — Each Way - Robert Curtis - Страница 5

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When he had spoken of my helping to write history, Wallace had been nearer the truth than he had suspected. I was invalided home from the East in 1916, and in 1917, on my discharge from hospital, was appointed confidential clerk to Field-Marshal Lord French, who at that time was Commander-in-Chief of the Home Forces.

Lord French was engaged in writing his famous book "1914," dealing with the war, and my time was almost entirely occupied in taking down the book in shorthand from his dictation and transcribing on the typewriter. Fate seemed to have predestined me to be associated with the writers of thrilling stories.

Lord French, incidentally, had one characteristic in common with Edgar Wallace; he could very easily be distracted from the work of literary composition. With Wallace it needed only a race meeting to make him abandon desk, Dictaphone, secretary and editors and set off lightheartedly for the course; with Lord French it was usually some detail in the events which he was describing that caused him to interrupt his dictation.

He would suddenly pause, get up from his chair and go to a large-scale map of the Western front which hung on the wall, and indicate a spot with his finger. "You see, Curtis, it was like this," he would say.

"We were here, and the enemy was there, and the problem I had to solve..."

And that would be the end of work for that morning. It was intensely interesting, but I must admit that military strategy and tactics were less intelligible to me than the strategy and tactics of Wallace's crooks.

As soon as I was discharged from hospital I called on Wallace, and found him sitting at his desk, with his usual smile, and his Dictaphone mouthpiece in his hand. He might have been sitting just like that ever since I had left him.

"Hullo, Bob!" was his greeting. "Know anything?"

"All I know," I answered, surveying him critically, "is that while I've been away you've added several inches to your waist measurement."

Wallace said that was the worst communiqué from the front that had so far reached him. He added that during my absence he had had nine different typists, only one of whom could spell, or understood the uses of a comma, and he had just started a new serial which he wanted me to type. I must somehow wangle it to get free of my job with Lord French and return to the Wallace fold.

We agreed on a compromise; there should be no attempt at wangling, but I would do all the work I could for Wallace in my spare time. He felt, I think, that he was treating Lord French very well.

Demobilisation set me free in 1919, and I again started my own typewriting business, doing most of Wallace's work for him as I had done before the war. This continued for several years. But reviving a business which had been dead for a long while was no easy matter. For a time I managed to keep it breathing, but only just. Everything at that time went wrong for me, and at last, when I could carry on no longer, I decided that the only thing to be done was to pocket my pride and tell Wallace just how matters stood. Reluctantly one day I went to see him, counting on his ingenuity to suggest some way out of my difficulties.

But I had counted on the wrong quality. His generosity was greater even than his ingenuity. He did not let me get very far with my story.

"You'd better come and join up with me as my secretary, Bob," he said. "I've got no money, but I'll guarantee you four pounds a week."

Still the great-hearted gambler! Wallace told me later that he had always wanted me in his permanent, whole-time employment, but had never till then dared to commit himself to paying even a small regular salary.

So began a still more intimate association with him which was only broken by his sudden death in Hollywood. They were stirring years, full of interest and packed with thrills; and not the least of the thrills were those afforded by Wallace's financial vagaries.

He was a lavish spender. The habit of counting the cost of anything in advance presupposes a measure of prudence and cautiousness which was not included in his make-up. In his heart I think Wallace had a contempt for prudence and cautiousness as virtues of a negative type which had something rather petty about them. He had scant sympathy really for the man who would first dip his toes in the water, and then, if it were not too cold, wade cautiously out and be careful not to swim beyond his depth. The right way was to take a header from the topmost diving-board and trust to providence that the water was deep enough to prevent your skull being cracked on the bottom.

Optimism and self-confidence were two of Wallace's predominant qualities. If he wanted a thing he would never pause to consider whether he could afford it; he bought it. His optimism persuaded him that he would manage to pay for it somehow; his self-confidence never failed to convince him that he could make money just whenever he wanted to. Economy was a word of which he may possibly have heard, but which never intrigued him sufficiently to make him inquire into its meaning.

His motoring was a fair example. Wallace abominated walking. After the war, before the halcyon days of Portland Place, Bourne End and the Carlton, he was living in a flat in Clarence Gate Gardens, Baker Street, which was approached by a flight of, I believe, twelve or thirteen steps; but he invariably went up and down by the lift.

Tubes, 'buses, or even taxis never seemed to commend themselves to him as methods of transport worthy of his serious consideration, and he formed the comfortable but expensive habit of hiring a large and luxurious limousine car on any and every occasion.

His bills from the hire company were appalling, and on the arrival of one such account I prepared two statements which I hoped would so impress Wallace that he might take steps to bring down his motoring expenditure to a more reasonable figure. One statement showed the sum he had spent on car hire during the preceding twelve months, and the other, which set out the cost of running a car of his own, including chauffeur's wages, garage, running expenses, etc., proved conclusively that by becoming a car owner he could effect a very considerably saving.

I showed the statements to Wallace. I am sure he was impressed, because he remarked that I should make a very good accountant. And that, for some years, was as far as it got. I should have known better than to introduce that word "saving" into the conversation. I am sure it scared him off.

Eventually, of course, he bought a car. It was a handsome car, but I never could bring myself to like it, for it was the cause of my unwittingly letting Edgar down. There arrived at the flat one afternoon his bank manager, a charming and long-suffering man. Wallace, in the midst of an overdue instalment of a serial, had heard the call of the turf and gone off to a race meeting, so I entertained the manager with a cup of tea, and sat and chatted with him in the study. In the course of our conversation I casually mentioned that we had just bought a car, and I wondered why the bank manager sighed and looked so wistful.

I understood a few days later, when there arrived a letter from the bank, couched in gently reproachful terms, regarding the amount of Wallace's overdraft.

Up to that time I had not been fully admitted into Wallace's confidence as regards his financial affairs, or I should certainly have conducted his bank manager along some less hazardous conversational path. Edgar, I fancy, realised the risks to which such reticence exposed him, and thereafter in money matters there were no secrets between us.

From that time the standard of our motoring comfort and elegance rose by leaps and bounds. Once Wallace had started buying cars, it was difficult to stop him, and ultimately we arrived, as I knew we were bound to arrive, at the crowning dignity of a Rolls-Royce.

The Ringer, Edgar's most successful play, had been produced a couple of weeks previously by Sir Gerald du Maurier at Wyndham's Theatre. It had met with instant success, and cheques for such heartening sums in respect of royalties had begun to arrive that I began to fear that, as long as the play was running, squeezing blood from a stone would be a simple matter compared with extracting articles or stories from Wallace. He was making bigger money than he had made for a long time—bigger, perhaps, than he had ever made—and I knew that something was bound to happen.

"Bob," said Wallace one sunny morning, after duly inquiring if I "knew anything" and making a bet with his bookmaker over the telephone which sent a cold shiver down my spine, "Bob, we're doing well."

Spring was in the air, but Wallace did not need that stimulus to be himself. I cautiously agreed that the prospects were less gloomy than they had been recently, but doubted if they were sufficiently dazzling to justify the bet he had just made. There was a look in his grey eyes of which I was afraid I knew the meaning.

Wallace grinned.

"Let's play up the luck and buy a car."

"But you've got a car—" I began.

"A good car," said Wallace, and picked up the receiver of his telephone.

His idea of a good car was on a par with his ideas of most other things; what it lacked in prudence it made up for in bigness of conception. There glided up to our doorstep a few days later a luxurious limousine of the most expensive type obtainable—to be superseded a year or so later by another, still more luxurious and expensive, which, as it stood shining and glistening by the kerb, made even Portland Place look poverty-stricken and in need of a fresh coat of paint.

Everyone who saw it admired it—with one exception. Captain Erskine-Bolst, M.P., who was Wallace's political opponent in Blackpool at the last general election, referred to it in one of his speeches as "that yellow horror." Thus can political prejudices blind us to true beauty. To Wallace that remark was, I fancy, the unkindest cut of all in a campaign by no means notable for its freedom from personalities.

Edgar did everything thoroughly. Having turned his attention to cars, he saw the matter through in his usual free-handed way. Every member of his family, with the exception of his youngest daughter, Penelope, whom, since she was only four years of age, he was reluctantly compelled to pass over, was presented with a car, and a whole fleet of vehicles was garaged in the mews behind the house. Wallace at this time was making a very big income, and he continued to play up his luck. He had a beautiful country house at Bourne End, a flat in Portland Place, a furnished flat in the Haymarket, which was used exclusively as an office and was rarely occupied by anyone but myself and an assistant secretary, and a suite of rooms at the Carlton, with a private telephone line to the Haymarket premises.

I remember receiving an urgent summons one Sunday to go down to Bourne End, and drove there in my car. It was a very old car; it had been middle-aged when I had acquired it; its sole claim to survival was that it went.

Edgar's Rolls, with its long, shining body, stood in the drive, and I stopped my contraption beside it with a screeching protest from the brakes which was more than usually strident. Wallace, not unnaturally, came out to discover what was responsible for breaking his Sabbath peace. He strolled around my car, inspected the licence, rubbed the door panel with the tip of a finger, peered at the spot he had laid bare, and gave a quizzical smile.

"According to the licence, Bob, your car is blue," he said laconically, and led the way into the house.

There was work to be done that afternoon—Wallace did much of his work during the week-ends—and no further reference to my car was made. I did notice, however, that as I started up the engine to leave, Edgar sighed and eyed the bonnet reproachfully.

The next morning he called me into his study.

"Bob," he said, "The Squeaker's just being produced in New York, and if it's a success I'm going to buy you a new car."

But he could no more be patient in his generosity than he could be patient in anything else. Within an hour came another summons to his study.

"I've been thinking," said Wallace. "The Squeaker doesn't come on in New York for a month yet, and your car will never hang together till then. You'd better take a stroll along Great Portland Street and buy yourself one."

I began to thank him, but he would not listen. Once again he was only doing it from purely selfish motives. If people saw his secretary in a ramshackle vehicle such as I drove, they would suspect him of paying me a starvation wage. It was a little thin, and no pretence of believing it.

"It's frightfully kind of you—" I began.

"Besides," interrupted Wallace, "you leave the atrocity outside the house, and as a residential district Portland Place is being ruined."

Within an hour I had added yet another saloon, blue beyond all question, to the ever-growing transport facilities which were at our disposal, and Edgar, with his usual nonchalance, signed the cheque.

In those latter days of prosperity Wallace had a large staff of servants—a valet, two footmen, two chauffeurs, several gardeners, a butler, a groom, and the usual complement of housemaids and parlourmaids and cooks and what-not. I wonder, had he lived to return from Hollywood, how many cars he would eventually have had attached to his establishment!

His recklessness in involving himself in financial difficulties was only equalled by his ingenuity in getting out of them. There was, of course, always the final resort of writing a story—either a short story or a serial, according to the exigencies of the crisis. But writing a story, even given the inclination to do so and a day when there was no racing to lure him from his desk, required a certain amount of time; and in the earlier days of my association with him, when the financial crises were of constant occurrence and pronounced acuteness, time was usually an important factor. As an accessory in many of his financial machinations I went through some of the most nerve-racking ordeals of my life. Wallace, even at the most crucial moments, never turned a hair. I used to wish sometimes that a hair or two had been capable of turning.

He walked into my room one morning with his usual smile and made the all too familiar announcement.

"Bob, I'm broke."

I made no comment. I waited to hear whether a story was to be written at breakneck speed or some new ingenious scheme for raising the wind to be put into operation. I was prepared for almost anything—except for Wallace's next remark.

"Write me a cheque on your account for a couple of hundred, will you?"

I stared at him, dumbfounded. He was as well aware of my financial instability as I was of his, and though he might not know, as I knew, that the balance in my account, if the bank had met the last cheque, was £2 on the debit side, he must know that he was asking me to write a cheque for about ten times the largest sum that ever stood to my credit for more than a couple of days.

"It's all right, Bob," he said easily. "I must have two hundred quid this morning, and I can't think of any other way of raising it. But I won't let you down. You shall have the cash to pay in before the cheque is presented."

I wrote the cheque. It was the first cheque for a three-figure sum that I had ever drawn, and there was only an overdraft of £2 to meet it; but I signed my name with an air of nonchalance which must have satisfied Wallace that he had a promising pupil. I would not have signed that cheque for any other man alive.

It was a tribute, I think, even to Wallace's well-known loyalty to his word—"Thou shalt not let anyone down" was his eleventh commandment—that I thought no more about the matter until, the following afternoon, he thrust a wad of five-pound notes into my hand.

"Thanks, Bob," he said. "You'd better go and pay it in at once."

As I entered the bank I had a sensation that something was amiss. The cashier's welcome, never any too cordial, was noticeably chilly; I noted that the clerks were staring at me over their ledgers with unfriendly eyes, and I do not think it was fancy that the bank messenger sniffed as he passed me. Someone tapped my shoulder.

"The manager would like to see you, Mr. Curtis."

The manager, scowling and frigidly distant, had a question to ask. Why, he demanded, when my account was already overdrawn, had I had the criminal temerity to utter a cheque for two hundred pounds? The cheque, of course, had been dishonoured, and he awaited an explanation.

I did my best to give him one, but he was not in the least interested. I flourished my wad of notes, but it was like a red rag to a bull. By some unexpected mischance the cheque had been presented earlier than it should have been in the normal way—Wallace knew to a nicety all details concerning the clearing of cheques, and none was more skilled than he in the tactical use of an account—the money had not been there to meet it, and here was an infuriated manager demanding to know what I meant by it and refusing to let me answer. Finally he intimated that, as soon as I had repaid my £2 overdraft—plus interest—I might consider my account closed.

"Sorry, Bob," said Wallace when I told him what had happened. "But you can open an account at another bank, and I'll guarantee the overdraft."

My bank manager in those days had never shown me any marked affection, and I am afraid that this incident turned his diffidence into something very like hatred. If time has not mellowed him, it may be some slight balm to his outraged feelings to learn that, all unwittingly, he shared in a scheme which, at any rate for a few hours, helped one of the best of good fellows out of a serious difficulty. Had he known Edgar Wallace as I knew him, he would have done the same for him himself.

But Wallace had more original and ingenious methods than that. He was a great opportunist, and none knew better than he how to turn present circumstances to his own advantage.

At one time, when he was writing the racing column for a well-known journal, he struck a more than usually barren patch. It lasted so long without showing any signs of improvement that I began to wonder whether Wallace had lost his skill or was suffering from an unprecedented dearth of ideas.

"Bob," he said one morning, "why shouldn't I be a tipster?"

I had thoughts of pointing out, as a reason why he should not, that the number of winners among the horses he tipped in his racing column was negligible. But I remembered that no tipster would consider lack of winners among his tips a disqualification for his business, and contented myself with expressing the opinion that, if the tipster's business was intended as a money-making project, writing a story would doubtless prove far more remunerative.

"I've got an idea," said Edgar, his eyes alight with excitement.

"Joe Austin" was not the actual name under which Wallace chose to carry on his tipping venture, but it will serve. Not many days later some thousands of persons who were interested in racing received a circular letter from one Joe Austin, setting out in glowing terms the qualifications which entitled Joe to their confident patronage, and the prospects which were theirs if they had vision enough to follow, and, of course, pay for, his advice.

Joe, it appeared, was in the habit of receiving last-minute information from sources of unimpeachable reliability concerning the winners of certain races. He was to receive one such titbit next week—for a race on the Wednesday, let us say. It would be absolutely last-minute information and he would not himself receive it in all probability until the morning of the race, but he undertook that to every person who forwarded him the sum of one shilling the tip should be communicated before midday on the Wednesday. It was a cleverly written circular with the authentic tipster's touch about it. In the subtle way which such circulars have it somehow persuaded one against one's better judgment that Joe Austin was a man with unequalled means of securing secret information and of irreproachable integrity. I have received hundreds of tipsters' circulars in my life, but I have never seen one better calculated to coax a shilling from a punter's pocket.

Wallace showed me the circular—he had spent a long time on its composition—and asked me what I thought of it; and, though experience had made me a very hardened sceptic, if I had not known that Joe Austin was Edgar Wallace, in whose racing tips I had learned to place only the very feeblest confidence, I should have handed him my shilling, ill as I could afford it, there and then.

I had only one criticism of the circular to make. Wallace, like most authors, was not incapable of making grammatical slips, and part of my duty as his secretary was to stand as a watch-dog between Wallace and the purity of the English language, and put such trifling lapses right. I never troubled to point them out to him. But he was sending the circular straight away to be duplicated without my having an opportunity to edit it, and there were two mistakes so glaring that I felt in duty bound to point them out.

"Anything wrong?" inquired Wallace, noting, I suppose, my pained expression.

I handed him the letter.

"If the subject of a sentence is in the plural," I said, not, I am afraid, without a hint of superior knowledge in my manner, "it is invariably followed by a verb in the plural. See paragraph one. And in the second paragraph 'was' should be 'were'."

Wallace grinned.

"I put those mistakes in purposely," he said.

I suppose I showed my perplexity.

"Because," he explained, "Joe Austin is a genuine racing tipster. Did you ever get a letter from a racing tipster which didn't contain a mistake in grammar?"

I was silenced. Wallace, I realised, was right. With his customary thoroughness he had made Joe Austin true to type down to the very smallest detail.

The circulars despatched, we waited for the result—Wallace with his usual optimism, I with decided misgivings. Joe Austin's ungrammatical letter did the trick; letters containing coin, postal orders or a shilling's worth of stamps came pouring in, and my uneasiness increased. At length I ventured to broach with Wallace the cause of my misgivings.

"All these people are sending you money," I said, "which they probably can't afford. They're banking on your giving them a really good tip—"

The look of reproach in Wallace's eyes made me pause.

"That's all right, Bob," he said. "I'm not going to let them down."

"But if you've no real information to hand on to them—"

"I have," he said. "I've a good 'un for the big race on Wednesday. So-and-So"—naming a famous jockey—"gave me the tip a week ago. It's the biggest certainty there's been this season, and he told me to put my shirt on it."

He waved a hand towards the pile of postal orders on the table.

"I'm giving them good value for their shillings," he said, "and they're providing me with the shirt. That's fair enough, isn't it?"

I might have known it. Wallace was incapable of being anything but fair.

By the Monday morning Joe Austin's letter had brought in over £200 in shillings, and Wallace was delighted. I did not share his delight. I could not for the life of me see how the scheme was even to pay its way, let alone show the handsome profit on which Wallace was counting. Each client had forwarded only one shilling; each telegram to be despatched on the Wednesday morning would require a shilling stamp; the printing and postage of the circulars had to be paid for according to all the established rules of book-keeping the net result on Wednesday must inevitably be a balance on the wrong side. I did just hint at the likelihood of such a contingency, but Wallace only grinned.

On the Monday evening I understood. That night Joe Austin posted to all his clients a second letter. It gave the name of the horse which was the "good thing" for the race on Wednesday, and stated that, as the information from the unassailably reliable source had already come to hand, Joe Austin was passing it on to his clients immediately. The tip was the biggest racing certainty of the season, and some of them might wish to indulge in ante-post betting.

Only about a dozen telegrams had to be sent to clients whose shillings arrived too late for a letter to reach them in time, and the difference between the total sum received in shillings and the total expenditure on 1½d. stamps and the circulars, was roughly £200. Wallace, of course, had had it all mapped out ahead and had never intended sending telegrams.

He himself put his shirt on it. On the Tuesday he put the whole £200 on the horse in question, and when, in the afternoon, I went to his study to tell him that the horse had won at 6-1, he only nodded.

"Did you back it, Bob?"

I admitted to a modest bet of 10s.

"That's all right," said Edgar. "I put ten quid on for you."

That was the end of the tipster's business. Wallace was in funds again, there was no further cause for immediate anxiety, and consequently Joe Austin was consigned to those realms of imagination from which he had originally come.

By some such ingenious expedient we weathered in those early days the frequent financial hurricanes that bent us. Wallace was nothing if not ingenious. As an exhibition of ingenuity combined with nerve, I think that one of his bouts with the unfortunate Inland Revenue official to whom fell the arduous task of extracting income tax from Wallace, would take a good deal of beating.

Wallace, at the time in question, was the owner of a certain two-year-old racehorse. In common with many another which later joined his stable, its chief failing was that it was not a very good racehorse; but it cost him a great deal of money to keep and run, and in the hope, I imagine, of making it pay some slight contribution towards its board and lodging, Wallace conceived the idea of claiming a rebate of income tax on the sum which the animal annually cost him. He explained to the income tax collector that, as a racing journalist whose duty it was to supply the readers of an important daily newspaper with information concerning the merits of racehorses, he found it absolutely essential to the efficient execution of his job to keep and run a two-year-old of his own. Only by this means could he satisfactorily get a line on the form of other two-year-olds and give his hundreds of thousands of readers the reliable information which they expected from him. Running a racehorse of his own was therefore a regrettable but necessary expense incurred solely to enable him to carry on his business as a racing journalist, and the total sum spent each year on the animal should be deducted from his rateable income and exempted from tax.

Wallace, however, though I think he deserved to, did not get away with that. The income tax official, seeing visions, I suppose, of a future stable full of thoroughbreds of varying ages, all of which were regrettable but necessary expenses incurred solely to enable Wallace to carry on his business, shook his head and would have none of it.

It is significant, perhaps, that in recent years the would-be collector of Wallace's income tax had a favourite monosyllabic expletive to which he would always resort on the occasions when most of us would indulge in a hearty "Damn!" The expression most frequently on his lips was "Gloom!" How far the daily disappointments of his occupation were responsible for his morose manner of swearing is an open question. If he had many taxpayers like Edgar Wallace on his books his pessimistic taste in expletives is readily explained.

It was typical of Wallace that he always imagined during a fair spell that the weather had permanently changed for the better and that hurricanes were things of the past, and that, when the next one showed signs of approaching, he remained serene and undisturbed until it was in full blast. Only then would he begin to take counsel with himself as to how shipwreck could best be averted.

His schemes were not always successful, but failure seemed as powerless to depress as was success to elate him unduly. The one was met with a shrug and the other with a smile; but neither, I think, was of supreme importance. It was the fight that appealed to him, and if one scheme turned out disastrously, he usually had another no less ingenious with which to replace it.