Sidney Price’s Narrative
CHAPTER 17
A GHOSTLY GATHERING
Norah Perkins is a peach, and I don’t care who knows it; but, all the same, there’s no need to tell her every little detail of a man’s past life. Not that I’ve been a Don What’s-his-name. Far from it. Costs a bit too much, that game. You simply can’t do it on sixty quid a year, paid monthly, and that’s all there is about it. Not but what I don’t often think of going it a bit when things are slack at the office and my pal in the New Business Department is out for lunch. It’s the loneliness makes you think of going a regular plunger. More than once, when Tommy Milner hasn’t been there to talk to, I tell you I’ve half a mind to take out some girl or other to tea at the “Cabin.” I have, straight.
Yet somehow when the assist. cash. comes round with the wicker tray on the 1st, and gives you the envelope (“Mr. Price”) and you take out the five sovereigns—well, somehow, there’s such a lot of other things which you don’t want to buy but have just got to. Tommy Milner said the other day, and I quite agree with him, “When I took my clean handkerchief out last fortnight,” he said, “I couldn’t help totting up what a lot I spend on trifles.” That’s it. There you’ve got it in a nutshell. Washing, bootlaces, bus-tickets—trifles, in fact: that’s where the coin goes. Only the other morning I bust my braces. I was late already, and pinning them together all but lost me the 9:16, only it was a bit behind time. It struck me then as I ran to the station that the average person would never count braces an expense. Trifles—that’s what it is.
No; I may have smoked a cig. too much and been so chippy next day that I had to go out and get a cup of tea at the A.B.C.; or I may now and again have gone up West of an evening for a bit of a look round; but beyond that I’ve never been really what you’d call vicious. Very likely it’s been my friendship for Mr. Hatton that’s curbed me breaking out as I’ve sometimes imagined myself doing when I’ve been alone in the New Business Room. Though I must say, in common honesty to myself, that there’s always been the fear of getting the sack from the “Moon.” The “Moon” isn’t like some other insurance companies I could mention which’ll take anyone. Your refs. must be A1, or you don’t stand an earthly. Simply not an earthly. Besides, the “Moon” isn’t an Insurance Company at all: it’s an Assurance Company. Of course, now I’ve chucked the “Moon” (“shot the moon,” as Tommy Milner, who’s the office comic, put it) and taken to Literature I could do pretty well what I liked, if it weren’t for Norah.
Which brings me back to what I was saying just now—that I’m not sure whether I shall tell her the Past. I may and I may not. I’ll have to think it over. Anyway, I’m going to write it down first and see how it looks. If it’s all right it can go into my autobiography. If it isn’t, then I shall lie low about it. That’s the posish.
It all started from my friendship with Mr. Hatton—the Rev. Mr. Hatton. If it hadn’t have been for that man I should still be working out rates of percentage for the “Moon” and listening to Tommy Milner’s so-called witticisms. Of course, I’ve cut him now. A literary man, a man who supplies the Strawberry Leaf with two columns of Social Interludes at a salary I’m not going to mention in case Norah gets to hear of it and wants to lash out, a man whose Society novels are competed for by every publisher in London and New York—well, can a man in that position be expected to keep up with an impudent little ledger-lugger like Tommy Milner? It can’t be done.
I first met the Reverend on the top of Box Hill one Saturday afternoon. Bike had punctured, and the Reverend gave me the loan of his cyclists’ repairing outfit. We had our tea together. Watercress, bread-and-butter, and two sorts of jam—one bob per head. He issued an invite to his diggings in the Temple. Cocoa and cigs. of an evening. Regular pally, him and me was. Then he got into the way of taking me down to a Boys’ Club that he had started. Terrors they were, so to put it. Fair out-and-out terrors. But they all thought a lot of the Reverend, and so did I. Consequently it was all right. The next link in the chain was a chap called Cloyster. James Orlebar Cloyster. The Reverend brought him down to teach boxing. For my own part, I don’t fancy anything in the way of brutality. The club, so I thought, had got on very nicely with more intellectual pursuits: draughts, chess, bagatelle, and what-not. But the Rev. wanted boxing, and boxing it had to be. Not that it would have done for him or me to have mixed ourselves up in it. He had his congregation to consider, and I am often on duty at the downstairs counter before the very heart of the public. A black eye or a missing tooth wouldn’t have done at all for either of us, being, as we were, in a sense, officials. But Cloyster never seemed to realise this. Not to put too fine a point upon it, Cloyster was not my idea of a gentleman. He had no tact.
The next link was a confirmed dipsomaniac. A terrible phrase. Unavoidable, though. A very evil man is Tom Blake. Yet out of evil cometh good, and it was Tom Blake, who, indirectly, stopped the boxing lessons. The club boys never wore the gloves after drunken Blake’s visit.
I shall never—no, positively never forget that night in June when matters came to a head in Shaftesbury Avenue. Oh, I say, it was a bit hot—very warm.