"It's a bad business, I'm afraid 'e'll——"
Then my mind trailed off into darkness and my body was trundled off to St. George's Hospital, from which the almost tearful Rogers later fetched me in a taxi, bemoaning the narrowness, not of my escape from death, but his own from destitution.
"I wonder wot 'Earty 'ud think o' that little yarn," Bindle remarked meditatively as he tapped the table before him with his mallet in token of applause. As chairman Bindle modelled himself upon him who lords it over the public-house "smoker." "'E wouldn't like to 'ave to give up 'is 'arp with angels flapping about."
"But it's only a—a—sort of dream, like mine," interjected Angell Herald, with a touch of superior knowledge in his voice.
Bindle turned and regarded Angell Herald as if he were an object of great interest. Then when he had apparently satisfied himself in every particular about his identity, he remarked quietly with a grin:
"O' course it was. Silly o' me to forget. Poor ole 'Earty. I wouldn't 'ave 'im disappointed. 'E's nuts on 'arps."
CHAPTER VIII
THE MAKING OF A MAN OF GENIUS
It was rather by way of an experiment that I determined to try the effect of irony upon the members of the Night Club. I confess I was curious as to how it would strike Bindle, remembering that remarkable definition of irony as "life reduced to an essence." The story had been told me by Old Archie, if he had another name none of us had ever heard it, who keeps a coffee-stall not far from Sloane Square. He was a rosy-faced little fellow, as nippy as a cat in spite of his seventy years, and as cheerful as a sparrow. He has seen life from many angles, and there has come to him during those three score years and ten a philosophy that seems based on the milk of human kindness.
Had he been gifted with a ready pen, he could have written a book that would have been valuable as well as interesting. "A man shows 'is 'eart an' a woman 'er soul round a coffee-stall," was one of his phrases that has clung to my memory. "Lord bless you, sir," he said on another occasion, "there's good an' bad in everyone. Even in a rotten apple the pips is all right."