“Oh, it’s you, Bertram. Thought it might be one of those young ex-officers who want to touch one for half a sovereign. Why the devil don’t they enlist in the Black-and-Tans and knock hell out of Ireland? Far more useful than lounging about without a job to do.”
Bertram did not reveal his thoughts on that subject, which were distinctly hostile. He merely repeated his enquiry as to what brought Lord Ottery to town.
His father-in-law chuckled, and said he would reveal a secret which he didn’t want all the world to know. He was doing a little shopping to replenish his wardrobe. He had discovered that instead of paying fabulous prices to his tailor in Air Street, he could get excellent clothes, ready to wear, at exactly one-sixth the price.
He had already bought two lounge suits which fitted him like a glove, except for slight alterations needed in the back and under the arm-pits. He had also found a shop in the Tottenham Court Road where he could buy first-class boots, suitable for country wear, at a saving of two pounds on those he had been in the habit of buying at Croxteth and Trevor’s in Pall Mall.
At one time, as he admitted, he would have shuddered at the idea of wearing ready-made clothes. In the old days, away back in Queen Victoria’s reign, he had been a regular Beau Brummell, and never wore a pair of trousers twice in the same week, or a neck-tie more than once after he bought it, but now things had come to such a pass that economy was the order of the day. Besides, what did it matter? It used to be fashionable—de rigueur, even—for the French émigrés after the Revolution to wear ragged lace ruffles. With super-tax at two shillings in the pound, land tax a frightful burden, and investments paying no dividends, people like himself would be reduced to taking in each other’s washing.
He mustn’t go too far, however, in cutting down his tailor’s bill! The other day an awkward thing had happened to him. He had bought a wonderful second-hand overcoat at a Jew dealer’s in Covent Garden, astrachan collar, silk-lined, a wonderful bargain—twelve pounds, ten shillings. Dunstable would have charged him forty for it, at least. But when he was about to hang it up on his peg in the lobby of the House of Lords, old Banthorp came up and said: “Curse me blind”—everybody knows how the old ruffian swears—“if that isn’t my old overcoat! There’s the very hole I burnt with the stump of a cigar, just above the third button!”
“Of course I had to tell him I had bought it from a Jew dealer, and he laughed so much I thought he would have a stroke. But the real cream of the jest is that he was wearing a ready-made suit himself, as he afterwards admitted. It was he who put me on to that shop in the Charing Cross Road. Lots of us are doing it now.”
Bertram laughed, and enjoyed the joke as much as was possible to a young man who had not yet come down to “cast-offs,” but was unpleasantly in debt to his tailor.
“Things seem to be getting pretty bad,” he remarked.
Lord Ottery stopped in the middle of Trafalgar Square and pointed his stick towards the clock tower of Westminster.