An urgent whip resulted in a full and slightly shame-faced attendance. Nobody tried to dispute that the Club was a corpse: the only question was what to do with its bones. “Well,” said Sam, “if none of you has a suggestion to make, I’ll make one. Nobody’s aching to take the stuff back where it came from. Now,” he went on candidly, “we could sell it to a dealer, but I’m against that because dealers are thieves and they’d give us about thirty bob for the lot. But my sister’s getting married and I don’t mind offering the Club five pounds for its property. That,” he indicated, “is a pound each for the five of you.”
“Cash on the nail?” asked Dubby, whose forebears came from Scotland. He distrusted Sam in the character of capitalist.
“Oh, yes,” explained the candid Sam. “You see, when I met Lance yesterday I said I’d think of a way out of the difficulty and I came prepared.”
“I vote we take it,” said Sandy. “I can buy a lot of tools with a pound.”
“I don’t see why we should pander to your vices,” said Lance. “We’re still a Club and this is club money.”
“The Club is dead.”
“Not yet. Not till we’ve killed it gloriously on Sam’s sister’s fiver. There’s a hell of a bust in five pounds and we have to drink the bride’s health. Champagne’s my drink.”
It wasn’t, but it was rather too often his father’s, and Lance was emulous, and, frightened a little of his own suggestion, carried things now with a rush. “We’re the Hell-Fire Club,” he said, “and champagne is the dew of Hell. Any member shirking will be held under the tap for half an hour.” They braved it out, most of them conscience-stricken, and the Hell-fire Club almost deserved its name in the hour of its extinction. Things might have been serious had not Sam, by a well-timed push, caused Lance to shatter a full magnum on the floor.
As it was, five hangdog members reached home late, but presentable. But they were most unhappy boys. The sixth boy was happy. He had consumed a sober and interesting meal at other people’s expense, encountering several delectable sorts of food for the first time and experiencing that human but reprehensible thrill which results from feeling that one is a clever fellow.
Distance of course lent enchantment to the Hell-fire Club. When school reassembled and boys fresh from the seaside tried to excite the jealousy of the stay-at-homes with tales of land and sea, they were loftily put in their places and struck to dumb admiration by legends of the dashing vice of the Hell-fire Club. It lived in story as it had never lived in fact.