It was the male voice that had cynically cried “Oh Lord, yes!” and “Hear, Hear!” when Jowell was speechifying. And a feminine voice responded:
“He meant well, dear, I’m sure! But what a dreadful man!”
Morty knew whom the officer’s wife was discussing with her husband. And whilst he burned and smarted, he admitted perforce the truth of their utterances. His father did stink of Money. His father undoubtedly must appear to persons of any breeding and refinement a really dreadful man. Why, his own son—
Later, when Morty was in bed in the comfortable lower berth of the state-room that had been expanded, to the compression of the young man’s fellow-passengers—and The British Queen, having left the glassy Solent far behind her, was beginning to roll amidst the restless surges of the Atlantic so that cabin doors banged, cabin crockery rattled, timbers groaned and creaked—and heavy rushes of footsteps on the deck were followed by the flumping of tightened canvas and the noisy coiling away of ropes—Jowell’s son—who, like his great parent, was of queasy sea-stomach—found this question cropping up again.
The Governor stank of Money. That was why his son, who had learned since he joined the Cut Red Feathers to refrain from quenching his thirst with brandy-and-water early in the morning, and to eschew cravats and waistcoats of violently contrasting hues—who had left off sleeking the stiff brown hair upon his bullet-head with perfumed bear’s grease and besprinkling his person with the combined essences of Frangipani and Jockey Club—found respiration difficult in his father’s company. But—was it only Money the Governor stank of?... The air of the big dining-room at Hanover Square had been heavy with the odor of roguery on that night when Thompson Jowell had laid his cards, as he had said, upon the table, and owned up to playing—from first to last, an infernal dirty game!...
“I’m a bit of a Cabbager myself!” Morty could hear him saying it. And—“The bad with the good—the rotten with the sound—that’s the secret of successful Contracting!”
It was jolly—confounded jolly to be a British Guardsman and know yourself the son of a father who had become a millionaire—and meant to become yet richer—by diddling the British Army. It was enough to drive sleep from any honest, decent pillow, and this is a feeble pen if it has not conveyed that Morty Jowell was an honest, decent young man. Vulgar and dull and clumsy perhaps—but sound at the core, and wholesome-natured, as his mother’s son could hardly fail to be.
The rolling of the vessel increased, and, from the adjoining cabin, occupied by the Honorable Mr. Skiffington, the Admiralty Agent—whose experience of the ocean had been gathered in the course of two or three Naval Reviews at Spithead and half-a-dozen trips across the English Channel—groans of the most piteous description now began to be heard. So Morty sat up, hugging his knees and frowning at the pale eye of the state-room port-light—which, sometimes hidden by its short green velvet curtain, or revealed—as the drapery swung aside with the ship’s rolling—seemed to wink in a derisive way.
“Gaw! how this dam’ ship rolls!—and, talkin’ of stinks—how smelly she is!... Horses and soger-men and tar and bilge—piff!—and somethin’ else to top up.” He sniffed, becoming more and more sensible of having inherited the queasy paternal stomach.... “Somethin’ I’ve smelt at those kilns at Little Milding—where the Governor dries his sprouted oats and mildewed hay.” He added, in an aggrieved tone:
“My forage ’ud taste a deal sweeter if it had been bought with cleaner money. That’s what I say, and to that I shall stick. And I’m ready to lay any fellow ten to one in tenners—and the Governor’s given me a hundred of ’em!—I shall come across that core of cow-parsley in every truss I get!”