"You've compromised Farrell pretty thoroughly, anyhow," said I grimly: "and you've compromised the cause in which I happen to be interested. Has it occurred to you, my considerate young friend, that Farrell has receded to 1000 to 1 in the betting?—that, in short, you've lost us the seat?"
"I compromise Farrell?"—Jimmy sat up and exclaimed it indignantly. "I lose you his silly seat?… Rats! The little bounder compromised himself! He's been doing it freely—doing it since ten o'clock—two crowded hours of glorious life… 'stonishing, Otty, what a variegated ass a man can make of himself nowadays in two short hours, with the help of a taxi and if he wastes no time. When I think of our simple grandfathers playing at Bloods, wrenching off door-knockers.… Oh, yes—but you're waiting for the story. Well, it happened like this,—
"Farrell called on you this morning, soon after breakfast-time, and found me breakfasting. He was in something of a perspiration. It appeared that he'd fired off a letter to the Times directed against our dear Professor; and, having fired it, had learnt from somebody that the Professor was a close friend of ours. He had come around to make the peace with you, if he could—he's a funny little snob. But you had flown."
"I had gone off," said I, "to catch Jack Foe and warn him that the letter was dangerous."
"Think so? Well, you'd left the Times lying on the floor, and he picked it up and read his composition to me while I dallied with the bacon. It seemed to me pretty fair tosh, and I told him so. I promised that if his second thoughts about it coincided with my first ones, I would pass them on together to you when I saw you next, and added that I had trouble to adapt my hours to political candidates, they were such early risers. That, you might say, verged on a hint: but he didn't take it. He hung about, standing on one leg and then on the other, protesting that he would put things right. I hate people who stand on one leg when you're breakfasting, don't you?… So I gave him a cigar, and he smoked it whilst I went on eating. He said it was a first-class cigar and asked me where I dealt. I said truthfully that it was one of yours, and falsely that you bought them in Leadenhall Market off a man called Huggins. I gave him the address, which he took down with a gold pencil in his pocket-book.… I said they were probably smuggled, and (as I expected) he winked at me and said he rather gathered so from the address. He also said that he knew a good thing wherever he saw it, that you were his bo ideal of a British baronet, and that we had very cosy quarters. This led him on to discourse of his wife, and how lonely he felt since losing her—she had been a martyr to sciatica. But there was much to be said for a bachelor existence, after all. It was so free. His wife had never, in the early days, whole-heartedly taken to his men friends: for which he couldn't altogether blame her—they weren't many of 'em drawing-room company. A good few of them, too, had gone down in the world while he had been going up. He instanced some of these, but I didn't recollect having met any of 'em. There were others he'd lost sight of. He named these too—good old Bill This and Charley That and a Frank Somebody who sang a wonderful tenor in his day and would bring tears to your eyes the way he gave you Annie Laurie when half drunk: but again I couldn't recall that any of them had been passed down to me. 'You see, Mr. Collingwood,' he said, 'when one keeps a little house down at Wimbledon, these things have a way of dropping out as time goes on.' 'Just like the teeth,' said I. He thought over this for a while, and then laughed—oh, he laughed quite a lot—and declared I was a humorist. He hadn't heard anything so quick, not for a long while. 'Mr. Collingwood,' he said, 'I'm a lonely man with it all. I don't mind owning to you that I've taken up these here politics partly for distraction. It used to be different when me and Maria could stick it out over a game of bezique. She used to make me dress for dinner, always. We had a billiard-room, too: but that didn't work so well. I could never bring her up to my standard of play, not within forty in a hundred, by reason that she'd use the rest for almost every stroke. She had a sense of humour, had Maria: you'd have got along with her, Mr. Collingwood, and she'd have got along with you. You'd have struck sparks. One evening I asked her, 'Maria, why are you so fond of the jigger?' 'Because of my figger,' says she, pat as you please. Now, wasn't that humorous, eh? She meant, of course, that being of the buxom sort in later life—and it carried her off in the end—' Why, hallo!" Jimmy exclaimed. "Are we home already?"
"We have arrived at the Temple, E.C.," said I gently, "but scarcely yet at the beginning of the story."
He resumed it in our chambers, while I operated on the hearth with a firelighter.
"Well," said Jimmy, smoking, "to cut a long story short"—and I grunted my thanks—"he told me he was a lonely man, but that he knew a thing or two yet. Had I by any chance made acquaintance with the 'Catalafina,' in Soho? 'Oh, come!' said I bashfully, 'who is she?' 'It's a restarong,' said he: 'Italian: where the cook does things you can't guess what they're made of. Just as well, perhaps.' But the results, he undertook to say, were excellent."
"Do I see one?" I asked.
"No, you don't," answered Jimmy, sipping his whisky-and-soda. "That's just it, if you'll let me proceed.… He said that they kept some marvellous Lagrima Christi—if I liked Lagrima Christi. For his part, it always soured on his stomach. But we could send out for a bottle of fizz—I'm using his expression, Otty—"