“There’s nothing in it, Marge,” he said to me one evening. “There’s only one sure way to win—back every horse in the race with another man’s money. I tell a customer the tale that I was shaving a well-known trainer that morning, and that the trainer had given me a certainty; all I ask is that the customer will put half-a-crown on for me. I repeat the process, changing the name of the certainty, until I have got all risks covered. I know it’s old fashioned, but I like it. It demands nothing but patience, and it cannot possibly go wrong.”
But it did go wrong. He was telling the tale of how the well-known trainer had given him the certainty to a new customer, whom Spearmint had never shaved before. By a disastrous coincidence it happened that the new customer actually was that well-known trainer. He seemed to think that Spearmint had taken a liberty with his name, and even to resent it.
Spearmint did not lose the sight of the left eye, as was at one time feared, but his looks have never been quite the same since his nose was broken.
My next brother, Orby, was born in 1870. He could do the most graceful and charming things. When his namesake won the Derby in 1907, he immediately acquired a complimentary Irish accent, and employed it in the narration of humorous stories. An accent acquired at the age of thirty-seven is perhaps liable to lack conviction, and I always thought that my brother was over-scrupulous in beginning every sentence with the word “Bedad.” Like myself, he simply did not know what fear was, and in consequence told his Irish stories in his own Irish accent to a real Irishman. However, now that he has got his new teeth in you would never know that he had been hit. It was said of him by a great legal authority—I forget in which police-court—that he had the best manners and the least honesty of any taxi-driver on the Knightsbridge rank.
Another brother, Sunstar, acquired considerable reputation by his skill in legerdemain. If you lent him a watch or a coin, with one turn of his hand he would make it disappear; he could do the same thing when you had not lent it. He could make anything disappear that was not absolutely screwed to the floor, and at public-houses where he was known the pewter from which he drank was always chained to the bar. He had something of my own quixotic nature, and would probably have taken the rest if he had wanted it. One day at Ascot he made a stranger’s watch disappear. When he came to examine his newly-acquired property he was disappointed to find that the watch was a four-and-sixpenny American Everbright—“Puts you wrong, Day and night.” He was on the point of throwing it away when the kindly thought came to him that perhaps the stranger attached some sentimental value to that watch; indeed, there seemed to be no other possible reason for wearing it. Sunstar determined to replace the watch in the stranger’s pocket. He did his best, but he was far more practised in removing than in replacing. The stranger—a hulking, cowardly brute—caught my brother with his hand in his pocket, and failed to grasp the altruism of his motives, and that is why poor Sunnie walks a little lame.
He is not with us at present. He had made quite a number of things disappear, and a censorious world is ever prone to judge by disappearances. It became expedient—and even necessary—for my brother to make himself disappear, and he did so.
The Second Extract, as they say on the film, will follow immediately.